Sometimes I feel that my posts here are one move too far from giving comforting care for the soul—one step too far on the side of afflicting instead of comforting; that is, afflicting the comfortable instead of comforting the afflicted.

And then I think, but we are way too much in love with our comfort.

You decide that.

Anyway, today I share the voice of Ken Sehested in North Carolina, my favorite Baptist, whom I have known as a fellow peaceworker and counted as a friend for more than 40 years.

When someone, in the context of the current rebellion against America’s racial and economic injustice, mentions “looting,” (probably to condemn it), what should be our first thought and response?

How about this, by African American Rev. Dr. Nick Peterson: “

“I mean if we want to talk about looting, let’s talk about the “stolen properties” that structure the entire existence of this horrible project. America is a testimony to the sanctity of white looting. #pentecost

Looting in 1607. That’s when the first “permanent” English settlement was established on the “James” river.”

One week ago an African American man named George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis while bystanders objected and recorded it all by video. Now more than ever U.S. Americans need to hear the voices of Black people, to try to come closer to understanding what is happening in the wake of that atrocity.

Today I encourage you also to watch the Youtube interview of Anand Giridharadas discussing his book THE TRUE AMERICAN: MURDER AND MERCY IN TEXAS, recommended in an email response by John Martin a few days ago https://youtu.be/8i-pNVj5KMw

I just read a book recommended by my grandson: THE TRUE AMERICAN: MURDER AND MERCY IN TEXAS by Anand Giridharadas (2014).

It tells a story of revenge and forgiveness after 9/11. A novel, based on fact and extensive historical research.

Asks a question: who is the true American? Or maybe, what is the true America?

A Dallas character in the story, anti-death-penalty activist and peace studies teacher Rick Halperin, said of this story: “I don’t know any other story that would raise the issues to make America look at itself the way this case does.”

To help America look at itself is the purpose of our inquiry into American exceptionalism. For our own good, individually and nationally, nothing is so useful as honest self-evaluation.

Maybe there is no “true” American, and no “true” America. We and it are all a mixture of true and false, good and bad, right? But even if that is your starting assumption, more or less true, more or less good still matter, do they not?

So today I recommend reading this book, or reading some reviews of it. What is the true meaning of America’s response to 9/11? Did the Texas murderer or the Bangladeshi Muslim immigrant get it closer to right?

While the left hand of the magician is over here, his right hand is doing something else over there.

Do you give your informed consent to a new cold war and a new round of nuclear roulette in which we could all lose but no one could ever win?

If you do, that’s a world you want but most of us don’t.

While we’re watching real and fake machinations around COVID-19, the magicians (power-hungry oligarchs and billionaires, militarists, heads of corporations and states) are envisioning new ways to control the world’s population.

You will have a healthier heart, mind and soul if you put courageous and persistent creativity and energy into resisting the propaganda of imperial powers in our troubled world. You will meet the resurrected Jesus while doing that.

If there is such a thing as American exceptionalism, it is most likely in the area of consumerist capitalism. To think more accurately about this is surely one essential path toward healing. How should we respond to this?

Paul Clark says that his response to America’s exceptional consumerist capitalism is to “return to a deep place within to know truly who I am and then attempt to create some modest friction within the Greed Machine.”

Norman Lowry has often said that his life is, among other things, a protest against the racism, bigotry, militarism and poverty-production of the American system. What does the Greed Machine produce? “Poverty production” says Norm.

Upon the recommendation of my grandson I’m reading THE TRUE AMERICAN: Murder and Mercy in Texas by Anand Giridharadas, a novel based on the murder and attempted murder of (supposed) Arabs post-9/11 in Dallas. One victim (who survived) this one-man retaliatory “war” was Rais Bhuiyan. The piece I’m picking up today from that story is one thing which Bhuiyan, a Bangladeshi immigrant to the USA, did to establish his authenticity as an American. Giridharadas describes it this way in the opening sentence of chapter 7: “In the America of the aughts, [first decade of the 21st century] nothing said you belonged like buying a car you couldn’t afford.” Bhuiyan did that, and struggled for 2 years with car payments he should never have committed to. But think of the pathos and tragedy of that sentence. That kind of self-inflicted suffering has damaged not only thousands of immigrants, but millions of U.S. born Americans and savaged the world as one of our “nonsensical greed-induced behaviors and systems” (Michael Moore).

So, can we move into new and deeper levels of imagining what must do to move beyond “greed-induced behaviors and systems”?

In response to “Truth: Making Uncomfortable and Free” https://1040forpeace.org/news-and-blog/ on Sunday, Dennis Rivers wrote: ”It seems to me, after a lifetime of wrestling with the Angel of Truth, that Truth is one of the most important of three or four central human ideas. Like an essential vitamin, it plays a role in almost all other ideas. But I like the expression “truthfulness” better, because it locates the topic inside of us as living beings, rather than just “out there” somewhere.”

Dennis goes on to point out how truthfulness is something we do, not only what we think. That’s good!

Paul Clark said that truth talk took his mind back to grade school when he quit saying the pledge of allegiance, because it did not pass his own truth test.

In this blog are now asking whether the notion of American “exceptionalism,” or “manifest destiny” to conquer the west and now rule the world, passes any reasonable or useful test of truth. Or is a more truthful assessment of our “homeland” available, as I suggested on Sunday?

We are a “capitalist” nation, by all estimates, and that raises the question of whether we will judge our capitalist present by its ideal or by its historical record. Going with the historical record, we do find what Michael Moore called our “various nonsensical greed-induced behaviors and systems.” I think we do have such things. Would you help me name them, and suggest ways we should be changing them for the health of our own souls and the world’s?

A wise person once said (it may have been Jesus) that you will know the truth and the truth will make you free. We like that. However, another wise person added “but first it will make you uncomfortable,” and we should remember that too.

We, in our selves and our souls, are nourished by truth. And by love and beauty. These and many other things will keep us in health and freedom. In our reflections on the notion of American “exceptionalism,” I suggest we think for a few days now about truth, love and beauty, each in turn.

When I suggested two days ago, borrowing from Michael Moore, that the exceptionalism in which USA Americans have excelled is “nonsensical greed-induced behaviors and systems” there was a flash of recognition in at lease some readers.

Paul Clark responded, “Until the great powers are forced to abandon the path of warring and death, the creation will suffer along with the poor.” Might it be that creation finds ways to complain about the human path of warring and death? The Spanish flu in 1918 came right on the heels of The Great War, WWI, in which some 20 million people died. The Spanish flu killed some 60 million people worldwide. I wonder how many people wondered then, “Given what a flu virus can do to humanity, why did we just kill 20 million of ourselves in war?” The endless wars of the USA have killed millions of people since 9/11—a truth which will make us uncomfortable if we let compassion inform our self-awareness. We are part of nature, not just “other” than nature, and if we respond to a viral pandemic by thinking about our war pandemic(s), maybe that is good for us?

In a personal note to me, another reader wrote “You addressed a topic that I think is one of the primary roots to our evil collective U.S. behavior—the absurd notion that we are exceptional (we are exceptionally evil).” That, if there is truth in it, is making us uncomfortable before it is making us free.

So it might be useful, if not at first freeing, to have a more truthful assessment of our (as the closet, or not-so-closet fascists call it) homeland. Let’s at least for a while try on that thought.

My last email/blog invited reflection on Michael Moore’s new movie “Planet of the Humans.” https://1040forpeace.org/soul-self-care-planetary-emergency/ That movie has proven to be intensely controversial in the environmental/green community, largely because it offers criticisms of some of the broad strokes and hopes of the efforts of the environmental movement to date.

We all want hope, and are instinctively critical of voices which question, or seem to question, particular sources of our chosen reasons for hope. So far so good.

But at some point it becomes necessary to ask whether our hopes are well placed and based on something better than wishful thinking and optimism fueled by ignorance more than awareness.

Today I want to suggest that for the betterment of our own selves (soul care) citizens of the USA would do well to reflect on what Moore called “our various nonsensical greed-induced behaviors and systems.” This, he says, is the MOSTLY feature of the multi-level planetary emergency. I’m not sure that I see his critics honing in on this challenge, but I am watching for that.

If you wanted to name the thing that best defines American “exceptionalism,” might it be an unwavering commitment to our various greed-induced behaviors and systems? Yes, I acknowledge that patriots, politicians and political theorists who use the word “exceptional” to define the essence of the USA mean some kind of divinely appointed global mission and/or infallible spirit of benevolence in our national character, but I’m challenging that idea of American exceptionalism and suggesting instead the one named here by Michael Moore.

This becomes a call to quit measuring our needs by our greeds, and it is addressed to all USA Americans whose lifestyle is already more than adequate (which is tens of millions), and not to America’s oppressed poor and disenfranchised. Overconsumption is not the problem of everyone in the USA or any country of the world, but it is the problem of those who think they run the country and the world, so let’s address it.

This old pandemic of greed and consumption has brought the planet to the brink of destruction—for all we know, maybe over the brink, but for now let’s still give ourselves the benefit of the doubt and say that maybe something can be done about it.

But what? You will ask, but what?

People say, “Well, we’d fix our more-than-four-months-old pandemics of predatory consumerist capitalism, fascist homeland security politics, and delusional global militarism if we knew what to do about them.” Would we really?

I’m not so sure about that, but I am pretty sure that if we thought that our various nonsensical greed-induced behaviors and systems were the biggest cause of the global crisis, we would be obsessing with the question of what should be done about those in a manner not too different from our obsession with what to do about COVID-19.

Jesus often said “Fear not,” but I do not know that he ever said “Look not.”

Over the years Michael Moore has invited the public to look at a number of things, most recently at the ecological abyss into which we stare. I recommend his new movie, “Planet of the Humans” online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

As I have said before in this email/blog series, the current focus on CORVID—19 must not cause us to forget all else about our world. The sustainability of our planet continues to hang in the balance, and failing or refusing to look will not change the fact that earth-care decisions and practices which emerge after CORVID-19 will decide our fate.

So I hope you will view “Planet of the Humans” and share your thoughts as we continue to seek to care for ourselves and our planet inextricably and all together.

On April 23 we considered ‘Wisdom essential for survival’ https://1040forpeace.org/soul-care-wisdom-essential-for-survival-4-23-20/. That reflection made a strong claim: that humanity must move from a notion of survival by dominating, homicidal power to the embrace of survival by empathy and cooperation with humanity and earth’s fragile ecosystem. Can we do that?

There is a lot of talk these days about getting “back to normal,” or finding “the new normal.” But let’s be clear that “getting back to normal” will not give us a livable future. What we have come to accept as “normal” was, and is, killing our world. That is the point of Arno Gruen’s book THE INSANITY OF NORMALITY: TOWARD UNDERSTANDING HUMAN DESTRUCTIVESS https://www.arnogruen.net/.

So will the current global agony issue in a turning (first of all for the U.S.A.) from obsession with war, military power and global domination? Of all the things we are thinking, obsessing, and praying about these days, this would be a good one for some of our time. It is extraordinarily hard to be hopeful about our future if we go back to the normal war program and global dominance aspirations.

Envision a better world, and resist war taxes or give us your ideas of something better, to make it happen.

“War or Peace: We cannot survive with Real-Politik” is the title of Arno Gruen’s reflection on modern culture and psycho-social conditioning. The following words in the second paragraph of the article state his thesis that “real-politic” is based on an ultimately suicidal belief that the world must be run by dominating, homicidal power. https://www.arnogruen.net/war-or-peace.pdf

“We live in cultures that are characterized by competition and insecurity and that make it difficult for people to develop the self-esteem that comes from a sense of one’s inner worth, which can evolve only if people learn to accept and share their suffering, pain, and adversity. This is what enables an inner strength to emerge—informed by an attitude of equanimity in spite of insecurity and of self-confidence in spite of helplessness. Only such a development forms a person’s genuine substance. In cultures that mistake strength for invulnerability, this kind of development is hardly possible because suffering, pain, and helplessness are stigmatized as weakness.”

Our challenge, he says (even, or especially in a pandemic time, I add), is to discover that suffering, pain, and helpless are not weakness, but the human lot which allows the person’s inner strength to emerge.

In the essay, Gruen argues that cultures condition us to think that competition and dominating power are the traits which assure human survival, crushing our in-born impulses for empathy and cooperation.

“Real-Politik” is a political philosophy based on that cultural conditioning. Ultimately it abhors human compassion, love and cooperation, considering them weakness. I wonder, is that our functioning, if not consciously explicit, political philosophy? If it is, what kind of leaders are we looking for?

Yesterday I shared the link to Arno Gruen’s “War or Peace:We Cannot Survive With Real Politic.”https://www.arnogruen.net/war-or-peace.pdfToday I’m wondering if you read it and what you thought of it—I saw no comments on it.

I know we’re all focused on surviving COVID-19, but I wonder nevertheless if we think or care about how we are going to survive war.

Gruen’s writings on “the insanity of normality” speak to our culture of obedience and dominating power.We have made obedience to (government and other) voices claiming authority and the global practice of dominating power (war) normal.Gruen says we cannot survive this.

What do you think?

John K. Stoner

4/17/20

See this and earlier “Soul Care” emails on the blogwww.1040forpeace.org.To start or end a subscription to Coronavirus Soul Care emails, send a note to me at jstoner961@gmail.com

The purpose of the title is to provoke interest.Cannot survive what?Read on.

What are we doing here in these Soul/self care emails?I see it this way:Some of us want to have hard conversations toward the end of avoiding even harder consequences.History is, after all,relatively (more likely absolutely) unforgiving.Having said that, I am the eternal optimist, believing that human nature is capable of much better things.

How does it happen that I find myself these days reading A SAVING REMNANT: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds by Martin Duberman?The stories of two Americans who spent their lives in the 20th century making sacrifices for the cause of peace and justice.It makes me wonder what the rest of us were doing in the 20th century.

Obsessed as we are, and no doubt should be, about the future we face, we could still do worse than consider our past for clues to the future.The prophetic word has always started with a clear and honest look at the past, not a magic or crystal ball prediction about the future.Prophecy knows that behavior has consequences, that the rape and pillage of lands and peoples produces moral injury in the lives of those who do it, and the future is not so quick to forgive us as we are to forgive ourselves. We have a fearsome corporate history.

But we also have deeply troubled personal histories.Our corporate and personal histories are like a bird with two wings and maybe it is too much to bring them both up at once, but thenyou think of a bird trying to fly with one wing….

So let’s take them together if they come that way.In an email yesterday Norman Lowry recommended the writings of Arno Gruen.Norm wrote:

Hello Blair (& other friends),

For a good look at The Insanity of Normality: Toward Understanding Human Destructiveness, I would suggest the following website of Dennis Rivers (friend of John Stoner and me). https://www.arnogruen.net/. I would also suggest that you consider reading Dr. Gruen’s essay; “War or Peace? We Cannot Survive with Real Politik” https://www.arnogruen.net/war-or-peace.pdf.

The second link given above (“War or Peace?”) completes the phrase “we cannot survive.”This essay by Gruen helps us to understand our society’s culture of obedience and dominating power.Given that we do want to survive, let’s read it and see what it says to our coronavirus moment.

We will spend at least a week, maybe two, on this essay.If we cannot learn something from this about our survival, we should quit wasting our time here and go back to beer, TV and shopping.But we are, I insist, capable of better things.

I had these thoughts this morning, before I read Julio Vincent Gambuto’s article submitted by James Landis last evening. I wrote down my thoughts (in response to Caitlyn Johnstone’s piece which I had just read).So my thoughts (in italics) below and Caitlin Johnstone’s piece are my contribution today, all as my expression of profound appreciation for Gambuto’s article (see it here https://forge.medium.com/prepare-for-the-ultimate-gaslighting-6a8ce3f0a0e0) and James sharing it with us.

In my view, we did not come to a place of believing the words of billionaire oppressors of common people overnight.We have been conditioned into this over a long period of time.Just ask yourself one thing:How important do you think it is to billionaires to have common people believe that they (the billionaires) care about everybody?How important?If it is important to them, what would they invest in psychology, sociology and advertising (propaganda) to make it happen?Please linger at some length on your own thoughts about these things.(For me the importance of all this goes way beyond presidential races,)

I hope we are not already at a place where we cannot (it is not safe to) ask such questions.

What follows is just the voice of one common person who does not have much money.I became aware of Caitlin Johnstone a few years ago.I was then and continue to be impressed by her courage.Maya Angelo said “Without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency. We can’t be kind, true, merciful, generous, or honest.”

“By ‘manufacturing normality’ I mean the way the plutocrat-owned political/media class pour massive amounts of energy day in and day out into making the ridiculous, horrific status quo seem normal.”https://t.co/ebZ9QjWQJS

,,,,,

This is the case not just with this bullshit US presidential race, but with all bullshit everywhere. A world where powerful governments attack, destroy, starve and undermine weaker governments which refuse to bow to their interests, a world where the wealthy continue to steal more and more wealth from an increasingly impoverished working class and use the leverage that wealth gets them to steal more, a world where governments demand more and more opacity for themselves and more and more transparency from ordinary people, a world where police are becoming increasingly militarized and speech is becoming increasingly restricted, a world where the response to a global pandemic is not to rally together and overcome but to advance pre-existing authoritarian agendas and manufacture support for new cold war escalations against China.

None of this bullshit would have been possible without all of us having been raised in an atmosphere of mass-scale obfuscation and manipulation. None of us would ever accept such a world without having been manipulated into it, which is why they have done exactly that.

What is inevitable, and what is possible?Those are larger questions, and/or assumptions, around which we form our ideas about how the world might be run.Is war inevitable?Is a world without war possible?Today I pick up the question of war itself.

So it has come to this: we are asking ourselves how the world might be run.Underlying that is something of an assumption that change might be good, that the way it is now being run leaves something to be desired.

This is a very old question, actually, and if COVID-19 is focusing our attention now, it could do worse than focus our attention on how the world should be run.

I tend to look in two directions for input on that, not claiming these to be comprehensive, but sensible places to start.First, to that significant (maybe we can agree) figure of history, Jesus.And second, to a piece of human experience, the success and failure of WWII.

Looking first at Jesus, he named himself “the human one” or “Son of Man,” as his most common self description.He identified himself as one of us, a human being.So let’s start out by doing what he did, identifying him with ourselves and ourselves with him, rather than jumping to mystical, metaphysical or spiritual religious confessions about how he was all different, greater, bigger and better than poor little you and me.

The words Jesus used to express his message and mission succinctly were “the kingdom of God.”Kingdom in his day and placemeant “way to run the world.”Kingdom meant hierarchical organization of the world around kings and kingdoms.But Jesus threw in a modifier to kingdom, and it was “God.” Kingdom of God.

God—that’s a big one!For starters I’ll tell you if I believe in God after you tell me who God is.Seriously, that’s only fair, and it will go some ways to level the playing field of our discussion if we both take some responsibility for defining the words we use.

I think of Jesus as spending his life showing what God—or if you prefer, Everything That Really Matters—is like.All of that in relation to how to run the world, which he called “the kingdom of God.”

He told “parables of the kingdom” and in one of them he said the kingdom of God is like a small seed which grows into a big tree.The idea which he lived and practiced most consistently was love, caring for one’s fellow humans.It was understood and practiced by few, small like a seed, in his time, and has remained pretty small ever since.But it has the potential to become big, if we were to choose it as our way of running the world. And it is just that, a choice which we could make in face of multiple other ways of trying to run the world, of which we see plenty right now.

The second direction I look for ways to run the world is human experience…what have we tried, how did it go?

And this comes less as a question to history than a question toyou as an interpreter of history—and the future.Maybe Jesus doesn’t speak to you.This is about how you speak to yourself and to others in your little circle of influence.

I submitted the following question last evening to David Swanson on the World Beyond War conversation, but of course there was not time for all the questions, and mine did not come up.Here it is:

David, do you think that the people of Germany were so depraved that they would have continued their support of Hitler if even half of the human lives and physical resources spent on World War II had been shipped to Europe to right the wrongs written into the Treaty of Versailles settlement of World War I?

Of course, the question about the Germans is beside the point now.But it’s the question we ask about any group of human beings which your government or mine might tell us is worthy of being visited with a “just war” today or tomorrow.Are they so depraved…?And in asking it, do not fail to assume that “they” are asking if “we” are so depraved….

Finally, ask yourself, are the people who answer “yes” to this questionpessimists or optimists?Or using other language, more hopeless or hopeful about the future of humanity?

Soul Care— What do CORVID-19 and War Have in Common?Considerations of the Inevitable4/8/20

Today (as a conversational device…not a teaching device, we know we learn by talking these days, etc. not from teachers, right?…yeah, I too know that) I will compare two evils.One of the ways we do learn is by comparing the familiar with the unfamiliar.

But first also an apology for using the word “evil.” That’s kind of old school language, so please think of your preferred word like sub-standard, retrograde, not cool or whatever and use that.

In any case, there are useful comparisons to be made between the CORVID-19 crisis and war.

Last evening I watched the two hour teaching conversation offered by David Swanson of World Beyond War.I believe that a few of you readers saw at least some of it, after Phyl Leaman and I shared an email announcement of it yesterday afternoon.

Swanson said things which most Americans have never heard or thought.That in itself would seem potentially useful, wouldn’t it?Or are Americans such a repository of wisdom that no one should presume to give them a new thought?(Let me say that I’m not nationalistic enough to think that, but I want to recognize those who do.)

Swanson said that war is not inevitable.Not inevitable, likeslavery, sexism, safety when you leave your house and join a crowd and racism are not inevitable.

There I referred to CORVID—19 in relation to “safety.”Now I will refer to war in relation to safety.All of this having to do with what is “inevitable.”

Even if the fact of CORVID-19 is (has been) in some sense inevitable, we are not going to treat as if it is inevitable, are we?First of all, we will have a healthy fear of it, and try to act accordingly, right?We kind of care about our survival in face of CORVID-19, yes, no?

So then, what about war and the fear of it as an issue of human survival?

A week or two ago I wrote that our history and practice of war has made us very ill as a people—we have suffered incalculable damage (moral injury)by our embrace of war and treating it as something inevitable.And we think we can do that with impunity, or some kind of immunity.

Have you tried suggesting that the consequences of COVID-19 might be anything less than threatening to human survival itself?(Linger on this thought for a moment).

But we do this with war all the time.In fact, as David Swanson told us last evening, the U.S. war machine spends billions of dollars convincing our population that war is not only less than threatening to human survival, it is inevitable, a good thing, and we had better accept it as a good thing or else.

If there is anything of a new thought for you in any of this, I encourage you to take a look at Swanson’s message.It’s still there for you at https://www.1040forpeace.orgWhen this page comes up, you could click on the Martin Sheen one minute video on “the weapon that kills the most,” just to get into the website.

I am not trying to recreate Swanson’s whole hopeful worldview here, just to intrigue us with what might not be as inevitable as we thought it was.

Imagine, a vaccine to protect us from the deadly propaganda that war is inevitable.We could call it “truth” or something like that.

John K. Stoner

_____________

This text is also available at www.1040forpeace.org.Respond there by using the Contact button at the top right.

THIS being, not what will a virus coming out of nature do to us, but what will we, with all of the possibilities of our own nature, do to ourselves?

We have needed something to focus our attention, the attention of the whole world, no less, on the hopeless situation into which our approach to living on this planet has brought us.Our attention—the whole world’s attention—is now focused as never before; as absolutely never before. and what are we doing with this attention?

Are we starting another war, a war on nature this time, like we started the endless wars after 9/11 on Them and The Other: Muslims, Eastern nations, Enemies all of them?

Another war as mindless and endless as the wars since 9/11?Did we learn anything from THAT?

When was the last time you felt a kind of immobilizing fear, as if history was being divided into before and after, as if everything was now changed?9/11 perhaps?Think about that now.

By any reasonable standard of all that is just and humane, our response to the test of 9/11 was an abject failure.

We turned an opportunity for honest self-evaluation into a miserable obsession with endless war.That is a fair and balanced evaluation of America’s response to 9/11.By any standard of all that is just and humane, you judge our response to 9/11.

Are we about to do something just as stupid with the coronavirus challenge of 2020?

Are We Starting A War on Nature? Is This the Real Struggle?

THIS being, not what will a virus coming out of nature do to us, but what will we, with all of the possibilities of our own nature, do to ourselves and to nature?

Like a deer in the headlights, we stand immobilized by what might be coming rather than mobilized in response to what is present.Let’s look at all, or something closer to all,that is present.

What if, due to immobilizing fear of what the virus might do to us, we close our eyes, then agree to economic, political and military measures which are certifiably more deadly than any virus which has ever erupted from the earth?Those economic, political and military measure present every possibility of doing to us what nothing from the earth itself has ever done to humanity

What the economics of predatory capitalism, the politics of homeland fascism and the militarism of nuclear insanity have done with their war on nature, and are doing to the human part of nature,dwarf the worst that millions of years of the biology of creation has ever done to humanity.Those years of struggle have produced life—all the life that we know. In starkest contrast, these above named human—these inhumane—projectshave been for years already threatening the destruction of the planet as a livable place.CORVID-19 has not lessened or removed those suicidal human behaviors, it has focused our attention in such a way that we could now choose to adopt aneconomics of democratic social caring, a politics of civil liberty and a global security system of nonviolent compassion toward the goal of our survival.That could be our response to this illness that comes from the earth, or from bioweapons laboratories, we really don’t know.

There is an indigenous wisdom of humanity which for tens of thousands of years sought the wisdom of how to live in harmony with the earth and its creatures.For several hundred years another paradigm of human “wisdom” has prevailed, one which has viewed creation as an enemy to be conquered, an opponent over which to gain dominion.The earth has taken all of that that it’s going to take, and it is now time for us to choose a new path.The indigenous and dominionist approaches might not be polar opposites, but they are distinct choices which take us in different directions.We are choosing.This is the real issue we face.

Today, in my series on Soul/self Care, here is an example of a group response to the problem of American militarism. The 1040forpeace.org group in Lancaster county PA, which supports conscientious objection to war taxes, sent the following letter (see text below) to the Mennonite Central Committee U.S. The concept of the letter predates the coronavirus panic and was not derailed by it.

John K. Stoner

1040 for Peace

108 South Fifth Street

Akron, PA 17501-1204

April 2, 2020

Ron Byler, MCC US Executive Director

Jesus Cruz, MCC US Program Director

Rachelle Lyndaker Schlabach, MCC US Washington Office Director

Jes Stoltzfus Buller, MCC US Peace Education

Dear Ron, Jesus, Rachelle and Jes,

Because of COVID-19 we live in a time of uncharted territory which provides a new opportunity for Anabaptist denominations and Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) to influence and bring about change in our world. A crisis has the potential to produce real change. When that crisis occurs, the available ideas prompt the actions that are taken.

Seeking to be the Christ-like witnesses that we are called to be, we believe the COVID-19 pandemic exposes a desperate need as well as a window of opportunity to encourage the reapportionment of the U.S. budget priorities away from military spending and toward health care, economic reform, diplomacy and efforts to mitigate the climate crisis.

As members of 1040 for Peace (https://1040forpeace.org), the mission of which is to encourage U.S. taxpayers to express their opposition to U.S. military spending and imperialism, we think now is the time for MCC to re-address militarism. Underwriting war-making compromises our faith. Indeed, we suffer moral injury when we continue to participate in actions which bring harm to others. The incalculable death and destruction wreaked on the world by U.S. wars has damaged America’s soul. We cannot ignore this with impunity. Because war-making is rooted in nationalism, we call on MCC US to launch a program of anti-nationalism teaching to prevent the U.S. from becoming like WWII Germany.

MCC has a proven history of providing assistance to and building relationships of trust with people who are suffering. This is the time for MCC to redouble its efforts to draw connections to US policy and the US systems that create war, displacement and poverty. These systemic issues should not only be the focus of the Washington, DC, office of MCC US; all constituents of MCC US need to be engaged.

These systemic issues need to be addressed while U.S. citizens and politicians alike are realizing that without adequate spending in public health, the country is not secure. The United States, indeed the whole world, is at much greater risk than was previously understood. When both the world and national health are at risk, something the US military cannot appropriately address, there is insecurity.

While the current U.S. government may have enabled economic growth and prosperity for the wealthy and increased the U.S. military budget at the expense of other public-oriented programs and the poor, it is clear that a strong economy and military power do not address the needs of the world’s poor or keep America safe, especially during a pandemic like COVID-19. Therefore, we want MCC and its constituency to encourage the U.S. government to reallocate the Pentagon budget toward health care, economic reform, diplomacy and efforts to mitigate the climate crisis.

MCC US can’t do this alone. It has to collaborate and become part of larger coalitions such as the Poor People’s Campaign, the NAACP and 350.org. But MCC US can help its constituency understand the need for military budget redistribution through renewed emphases on education and political advocacy for health care, economic reform, diplomacy and the environment. MCC US can also inform and help individuals and congregations do advocacy to communicate this message to government representatives. Yes, with its historic peace church reputation, MCC US can be a powerful voice while many question whether the huge U.S. military budget keeps America safe.

As 1040 for Peace we call on MCC US to re-engage the issue of the misguided and disproportionate U.S. military budget. That budget needs to fund programs benefiting humanity as a national security issue. We urge MCC US to engage and enable public deliberation to develop alternatives to existing policies.

Might what appears politically impossible become politically inevitable? Our hope and prayer is that when COVID-19 abates, when citizens and politicians are no longer controlled as much by fear, that people will realize that without adequate spending on health care, economic reform, diplomacy and the climate crisis, the world is at risk.

Imagine what it would do for the soul of America if the nation heeded the call of UN Secretary-General Antonio Gutierrez for cessation of all wars in the world now that the CORVID_19 virus crisis is upon us. “The fury of the virus illustrates the folly of war. That is why today, I am calling for a global ceasefire in all corners of the world. It is time to put armed conflict on lockdown and focus together on the true fight of our lives” he said on March 23.

While it is hard to imagine the U.S. war machine shutting down, why not? Readers have reminded me that the U.S. war machine is a response to the fears of the people—it is supported and paid for because we are afraid. That is undoubtedly true. Is it the last word? Shall it be the last word? Ultimately that is ours to decide.

It is good to acknowledge our fears—they are real and cannot be denied.

But we should also acknowledge our courage—that too is real.

And our imagination, which also is real.

Our fears will determine our destiny if we allow them to immobilize us.

For the USA to close down its war machine would be a great shock to the system—comparable in intensity no doubt to the coronavirus itself, but of a different sort. What energy are we willing to expend, what effort will we make, to see it happen? The task looks impossible, but we do what we can in the face of apparently impossible tasks, don’t we?

And I know that Joe Biden, who adamantly argued for the war against Iraq, is the favored candidate for president of many Democrats. As Andrew Bacevich wrote in “Judgment Day for the National Security State:” Imagine, if you will, Democrats in 1880 nominating not a former union general (as they did) but a former confederate who, 20 years before, had advocated secession.”

So we do not see the U.S. heeding the call for cessation of war, but be do not have to accept what is as what should be.John K. Stoner 4/2/20________Comments can be made at the “Contact” function at the top right.

“. . . overall, the pandemic has revealed in particularly stark terms that the extreme economic inequalities unmasked by the 2008 economic collapse remain unaddressed. There’s a titanic dynamic playing out now in real time. Celebrities and the wealthy are first in line for the lifeboats of coronavirus tests. Rupert Murdoch and his familyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/business/media/fox-news-coronavirus-rupert-murdoch.htmlwhile profiting from a news empire that downplayed and outright disputed the threat of the coronavirus. The permanent residents of resort towns on the Eastern seaboard are being shoved aside https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/25/nyregion/coronavirus-leaving-nyc-vacation-homes.html who are stripping shelves of food and flooding the limited local health facilities.

Another said:“I haven’t thought specifically of less arms production and the reason is probably that the arms industry is kept out of sight, spread around the country, out of mind. Actually, that doesn’t seem like a good answer. We could watch the stocks of the arms producers.”

And this question came:“I support you and your efforts but …

I have said earlier that I think violence, torture , war etc are like scabs in the infection of “FEAR” . Unless we address Fear we will only deal with the superficial symptoms of the Fears that we all deal with . This fear of “survival” in the broadest sense is not some excuse I offer but the cause of these terrible “Fight reactions” . Why is this not included in your concepts. What am I missing?? To begin the relationship with “Mutual fears” rather than You are evil for your violence and I am good because I am for peace will make a difference in resolution efforts. Such efforts requires greater effort to “understand” the person or nation etc and work to deepen resolution than just stopping the violence.

But what am I missing. ? I deeply applaud your writing and conversation stimulus.”

I hope I may be forgiven for trying to help us avoid national suicide by letting our fears of one thing blind us to the deadly plague of another thing.

John K. Stoner

________

This and earlier Soul Care reflections can be seen on the website of https://1040forpeace.org, in the right column blog.To respond, use the “contact” function, top right.

An assumption here is that societies, and countries, can experience collective moral injury as surely as individuals can experience it.

Rita Nakashima Brock has been a pioneer of naming and researching moral injury.With co-author Gabriella Lettini she published SOUL REPAIR: Recovering from Moral Injury after War, in 2012.I will quote from her book to give an example and description of moral injury.

“Women can also be used in sexist ways for torture.In one case, Alyssa Peterson served with C Company in Military Intelligence in Iraq as an Arabic-speaking interrogator at the prison at Tal Afar airbase.A twenty-seven-year-old devout Mormon, she was put in “the cage,” where “enhanced interrogation” techniques included “walling, cigarette burning, punching and being blindfolded naked.”The blind-folded captives were humiliated when their blindfolds were removed to show women were present.After two days, Peterson refused to continue with the interrogations.She believed the torture demeaned her to the point that she did not want to live with what she did in the name of serving her country.She shot herself on September 15, 2003.No public media source reported her suicide.

Any person with a conscience feels occasional guilt or shame for something she or he did, but war can require extreme actions that violate the very basis of moral identity.The life or death urgency of war forces untenable actions that can elicit profound gilt or shame.When we feel that what we did was wrong or unforgivable and that our lives and our meaning system no longer make sense our reason for living is in tatters.The shattering of the soul challenges what holds life together, and the anguish of moral injury begins.”SOUL REPAIR, p. 52.

Our country, the USA, sent Alyssa Peterson to Iraq, and we paid her to do what she did.We, that is, you and I with our taxes.For doing that we suffer some moral injury.My plea today is that we begin to think about what that means.And to begin to reflect on that, not as narrowly as possible, but as expansively as possible, so that we might find ways to look toward healing and away from national suicide. John K. Stoner______

Respond to this post using the “Contact” button on the right margin above.

I have started to post these emails on the https://1040forpeace.org website.You can find past and current posts of this series there.Sharing this URL with others will be an easy way to broaden the discussion.

Today something simple, just a question, before continuing tomorrow more deeply into the toxic ideology of nationalism.

Have you seen any cases or evidence of military production closing down as nonessential work in the US?Please let us know if you have.

And, had it occurred to you to wonder about that, or look for such closures?If that had not come to mind, why do you think it had not?

_______

Note:On the blog site, we have a monitored comment function.If you have a comment which is available for us to publish, use the “Contact” button at the top right, and don’t miss the CAPTA code at the bottom of the page!

Before going further with what is lost due to moral injury, let’s look a little more at what the healthy, pre-injury human being looks like.

I will share fresh insights which came to me this Sunday morning. Janet keeps me listening to Krista Tippet’s “On Being” early on Sundays. Today Tippet interviewed Ross Gay, whose bio includes this: “Ross is a founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a non-profit, free-fruit-for-all food justice and joy project.” His comments on delights, justice, sports, gardening and other subjects are interesting, to say the least.

Thanks for the things you have written in response to my last post. In general I think it’s good to share your thoughts with the whole list, but I do ask you to consider whether you want to reply to “one” or “all.”

Today I am moving into the theme of the subject line of this email. This will not be an easy journey. COVID-19, and other bigger things in our world, do not confront us with easy choices. Yes, bigger, which predate and will postdate COVID-19. I am not in the business of inventing or creating crises, but sometimes I do not shrink from pointing out those which exist.

When this COVID-19 event is over the world will face the same set of problems it faced before it started—with some new layers and twists, fears and possibilities , to be sure, but still the same—the big ones will not have gone away.

Of course, some of us won’t survive, but that’s true of every day and every epoch, isn’t it? I’m talking about those of us who do survive.

So, what about us? The problems still the same, will we be any different?

Voila, that depends on us. It is a safe prediction that many of us will be scarred in some way by trauma. Cold, gripping fear leaves its mark. Yes, war and great disasters leave PTSD in their wake. Can you imagine the PTST afterward? That’s worth a little thought now. Can we care for our selves now in a way that minimized PTSD then? Certainly worth asking.

But—why is there always a but?—there’s another way we may changed, and this one really depends on our level of soul/self care. This is the possibility of moral injury. Can we avoid moral

injury? We are diminished and damaged by moral injury.

The awareness—and/or acknowledgment—of moral injury is relatively new. Or the language, at least, of moral injury has only been used in recent years. PTSD is not moral injury, and moral injury is not PTSD. The cause of PTSD is what our circumstances do to us. Moral injury is what our behavior does to ourselves. Get the difference?

Moral injury results from a failure of self care.

We have said in the several preceding emails that self-care involves paying attention to how small or large we draw our circle of care. When we draw that too narrowly we violate the law of love in human nature. We are made to love, and when we don’t do that, we deteriorate as human beings. We flourish when we do to others as we would have them do to us, and when we don’t we don’t. It’s that terribly simple.

When we draw the circle of caring for others too narrowly, self care suffers and moral injury results. There are no exceptions to this, no way to escape it. But how we wish there were, don’t we!

So a couple of questions arise from this line of thought. An immediate obvious question is this: How do we know when we are suffering, have suffered, moral injury? It might not be easy to tell. But it’s a fair guess that we will know more if we are aware and pay attention than if we don’t. So we choose awareness.

Another question is whether our responses to our current circumstances are inviting or warding off moral injury. To that we can return.

But still another question is whether we have experienced moral injury in the past and are carrying it with us. That’s a big one, and if the concept itself of moral injury is new to us, attention to that would seem especially important. Let’s proceed to explore this a little.

The harm that others do to us can cause PTSD. The harm that we do to others causes moral injury to ourselves.

Start with this: we do harm to others. None of us are perfect. Life is not easy, we don’t always get it right, and we do hurt people. Often unwittingly, unknowingly, ignorantly. But to excuse ourselves for not being perfect should not be turned into not needing to try to do better, is that right?

We are therefore talking about the crucial need for a certain amount of self-awareness and self-criticism.

The COVID-19 event is reminding us of how inter-connected we are as humans. I am about to expand on that a little, drawing out some implications in time and space, for the past and the planet.

Racism is a process of drawing the circle of caring too narrowly. It says “I’m in, you’re out.” Racism is a case of failed self and soul care, and it causes moral injury. A racist person is a morally damaged and diminished person. We might like to deny that, we may wish to be an exception to that, but it won’t work.

Sexism is another process of drawing the circle of caring too narrowly. It says, my sex is superior; and as we know, that has usually taken the form of male sex is superior. Doesn’t work; moral injury occurs.

Nationalism is a process of drawing the circle of caring too narrowly. “May my country always be right, but my country right or wrong.” “Our country, love it or leave it.” Nationalism is a scourge of the world today. It does more damage than coronavarus plagues. Yes, it has done more damage than coronavarus plagues. Therefore fear nationalism—fear it very much. And I’m not talking about their nationalism, I’m talking about ours. We have been morally injured by nationalism, more than we know or want to know. But without knowing we walk on in darkness to self-destruction.

So we are going to look at nationalism and how sick we are because of it. Jump off now if you are unwilling to look at this failure of soul care and wish instead to carry the sickness unto death

_______

Here are some daily readings which I recommend from Richard Rohr https://cac.org/the-path-of-descent-weekly-summary-2020-03-28/ Scroll down this page until you find “Most Recent Post” and read his “Path of Descent.” Our look at nationalism and moral injury will probably be experienced as a kind of path of descent.

At this year’s Lancaster Peace Fest, 1040 for Peace representatives gave ten pennies to each of the 78 persons who stopped by our table and asked them to distribute the pennies into ten containers according to the federal budget priorities they would support. They “voted” as follows:

Education 19.3%

Environment/Green Energy 17.9%

Health 17.8%

Housing/Urban Development 10.7%

Diplomacy 9.2%

Veterans 8.4%

Mass Transit/Roads 7.2%

Agriculture 6.5%

Military/Homeland Security 1.7%

Other 1.3%

TOTAL 100.0%

Because it is not organized according to the Penny Poll categories, the actual federal funds budget, comprised of discretionary spending that Congress appropriates, doesn’t exactly compare. Some areas such as education receive far more funding through local taxes than through the federal funds budget which does not include dedicated funds such as Social Security and Medicare.

From mid 1966 through mid 1968 I was working under the auspices of Vietnam Christian Service assisting refugees in South Vietnam caught in the crossfires of the war. While I lived in Saigon I made many trips by air to areas in South Vietnam that were considered safe during the daylight hours. Almost every night I heard B52’s dropping bombs in the distance. I saw planes dropping bombs on rural area and villages. On one flight we needed to fly out over the ocean to avoid cannon fire from a ship shooting inland hitting who knows what. I saws planes spraying Agent Orange on the forests to defoliate the trees hoping to locate and destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Many nights Puff the Magic Dragon (a DC3 with 3 rotating cannons mounted on one side as it banked it sprayed bullets in every square foot the width of a football field) was circling just over our house. The intent was to saturate the area circling Saigon to keep the VC from entering the city. Much of this firepower resulted in indiscriminate killing of civilians. I saw many wounded and crippled women and children.

I was a conscientious objector doing alternate military service during World War II. Later, on return from Vietnam I declared that I was conscientiously opposed to paying for war while praying for peace. I began redirecting 50% of my tax obligation (the amount of my tax obligation that reliable reports indicated was paying for present and past wars) to organizations promoting peace. Each year I wrote to the President, my Senators, and Representative as well as IRS telling them why I was redirecting my tax obligation. Each year IRS found some way to collect this amount plus interest and penalties by attaching my wages, or taking it from my bank account. One year I took the issue to court declaring that I was conscientiously opposed to paying for war and paying this tax negated my right of religious freedom guaranteed under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The judge in ruling in favor of the IRS stated that he did not doubt the sincerity of my belief but the law was clear so he had no choice but to deny my claim.

Following that experience i decided that I had been fighting the IRS and that was a lost and useless exercise. IRS is authorized to collect the taxes imposed by Congress and has no freedom to make exceptions. Rather than redirecting a large amount of my tax obligation that IRS was eventually going to collect anyway along with a substantial amount of interest and penalty, I decided to do symbolic withholding along with being quite aggressive in informing our government decision makers that I was conscientiously opposed to participating in and paying for wars. In recent years I have been underpaying my tax obligation by $10.40. I have written strong letters to the President, my Senators, and Representative telling them I am opposed to all wars on religious grounds and that I am paying my tax obligation under protest. This small act of civil disobedience seems to catch their attention. I have a file about two inches thick of responses from the elected officials. The general response is that they will remember my concern when the World Peace Tax Fund is brought up for a vote.

Our usual experience has been that several weeks after paying our taxes both my wife and I get a letter from IRS requiring us to pay $10.40 plus interest and penalties that totaled less than $1.00. We file a joint return so IRS wanted both of us to know we had a pending tax liability. Usually we took this opportunity to send a second letter to IRS and our elected decision informing them why we were not paying this symbolic amount of tax. Usually that was the last we heard about this until one year when we were due a refund. We received the refund due, less the amounts that we did not pay over the past number of years. On years when we were due a refund we still wrote a letters to IRS, the President, our Senators and Representative informing them that we were conscientiously opposed to paying for war and had we owed taxes we would have underpaid by $10.40. This year we got a response from one of our Senators even to this letter.

There are others doing symbolic underpayment of their taxes, but we are not being heard. Our elected officials can and have been treating us as lone individual voices. If a million persons will join together in this effort and inundate our officials with letters of conscience and concern, we have a chance of being heard forcing action to respect our religious rights.

The $10.40 that you underpay is too small an amount for IRS to take formal action to collect. It also appears that they and the elected officials do not want this right of conscientious objection to paying for war to hit the press and become a national issue. Hence, to date IRS has not taken any aggressive action to collect this small amount. Let’s join together to make this a national issue.

When you receive your letter from IRS indicating you owe $10.40 plus a small amount of interest and penalty you have three options, any one of which is OK. I list them in the order of my preference.

• Do not pay this amount and use this opportunity to send a second letter to your elected officials, and if you choose to the newspaper, your church, and friends explaining your conscientious objection to paying for war.

•Pay the amount due to clear your record with IRS but send a second letter as noted in option 1.

•Pay the amount due to IRS to clear your record and assume you have already made your objections clear.

Berry Friesen died January 17, 2018 after a long battle with cancer. An active member of our Lancaster 1040 for Peace group, Berry was relentless in his search for truth and for his prophetic voice denouncing empire. There is no way to say all that needs to be said concerning his contribution to the cause of peace but the following tribute offered by his close friend and fellow peace witness, John Stoner, is a good start.

Tribute to Berry Friesen

January 22, 2018

East Chestnut Street Mennonite Church

Lancaster PA

In November Berry wrote to me, “Of all the Bible asks of us, I have most been drawn to “witness.”

I think that to him being a witness meant giving a fair and honest report of what he saw as God’s truth, or the great truths of the universe in which we live.

In that November email he wrote: “Three ‘turning point’ decisions of my public life were related to witness:

1. Taking a clerkship after my second year of law school in a storefront American Indian Center (instead of in a conventional law firm),

2. Leaving a law practice and moving to Pennsylvania to work for the church through Mennonite Central Committee;

3. Hanging out with war tax resisters during this last period of my life.

Berry did not go through life seeking the best job to give him the most comfortable lifestyle. In his view of God, or of every person’s giftedness, life was a process of finding one’s calling and vocation. So he accepted the vocation of being a witness. In the end, this made him what must be called a prophet. And he was aware of what all of us could see— a prophet is not easily or always praised in his own community.

Beyond himself, Berry saw the church’s vocation as one of being a faithful witness to the truth which Jesus lived and taught. In WATER FROM ANOTHER TIME he wrote about the Mennonite Anabaptist history of tension between staying or moving to find the best way to be faithful to the way of Jesus. He said:

“Both staying and leaving demonstrate an alternative to whatever brand of orthodoxy the powers seek to impose. Insofar as such acts are claimed by the church and explained to the public as faithful acts of witness, they create new options and demonstrate again why the story of Jesus Christ is called ‘good news’. ”

In that November email Berry also wrote, “Throughout my life I’ve had ambivalent relationships with groups. I think it’s because I instinctively try to be a voice for an important perspective missing from whatever group I join or am part of. Of course, important perspectives are usually missing from a group’s life because it is not desired. So this can be awkward.” This may explain a significant point of difference between me and Berry which we never resolved—that is, should the church not only welcome gay and lesbian people, but also bless their marriages, or sacred unions. There we just agreed to disagree.

Berry was a gifted writer, clear and precise. That made it especially meaningful to me when a few years ago he asked me if I would join him in writing a book on the Bible and empire. I enjoyed sharing that project with him.

Berry called the third vocational move of his life “hanging out with war tax resisters..” The 1040forpeace group which has met one wednesday a month at 7;30 am at Landis Homes has been much blessed by Berry’s participaton, and he will be greatly missed. A few weeks ago Berry and Sharon welcomed this ragtag group to stop in at their place on a Saturday morning, and I was frankly surprised how many showed up in response to a short notice email invitation—another evidence of how much Berry was appreciated.

As his faith matured, knowing when and how to resist empire became the great discipleship question for Berry. For the past 4 years, regular visits to Norman Lowry in State Correctional Institution Dallas, Pennsylvania became part of Berry’s routine. Norm was jailed for his resistance to military recruiting and his radical “no” to the 4 horsemen of the American apocalypse: bigotry, racism, militarism and poverty-production. Berry wanted to encourage Norm; he found Norm encouraging him.

Janet and I shared an interest with Berry in birdwatching. We often compared notes on what birds we saw at the feeder, or on our travels.

I’ve spoken of Berry’s vocation, but family was central to Berry; family was his vocation. His children and grandchildren were always on his mind. I will conclude by reading a poem of love and appreciation for Sharon which Berry wrote in 2006.

by John K. Stoner (April 14, 2017)

The second way of asking it is better, because it shows an intention to take the history seriously.

Good Friday has been a great Christian celebration across centuries and continents. The crucifixion of Jesus on Good Friday is the focus of the celebration. Why celebrate the death of Jesus?

Let’s start with the hardest and the worst of it. Over the centuries a tradition developed by the church and believed by millions of Christians holds that Jesus died because God willed and/or needed Jesus’ death. Notice, however, that this tradition attributes not a bad motive, but a good one, to God. God did it in order to make possible the forgiveness of human sins.

Now let’s be honest—human failure, or sin, is common and big. Who can look at their own life and not know that? And we find it is not always easy to forgive ourselves, and consistently try to do better. So, our forbears looked for a big solution to a big problem. Let’s make it God-sized, and see how God solves our problem. They picked up on religious traditions of sacrifice to the gods, and lo and behold, we get a notion of sacrifice in which the very son of God is the sacrifice which pleases God and makes the forgiveness of sins possible.

If that doesn’t work well for you, fine. Join tens of millions of other fellow humans who are appalled by such an image of God and way to deal with our problem of recidivism in sin.

There is a better way to understand Good Friday and the crucifixion. Start by asking who killed Jesus and why.

Start with the obvious. He was killed by people who thought that killing a person was acceptable human behavior, and—we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt—that they could improve the general human condition by performing an execution. Maybe we can give them a little more: they killed him thinking he was a bad person. They were wrong about that, so his death was collateral damage.

In short, Jesus was killed by bad people for being a good person.

Let’s parse that a little. Bad and good are relative terms, but that does not mean they are meaningless or useless. The bad here is the ancient and widespread human belief that some other individuals or groups are so bad that they must be killed in order to cleanse the land. They are scapegoated: those bad must be sacrificed for the sake of us good.

Jesus taught a different thing, another way. He said that none of us are so good, nor so hopelessly bad, that we can indulge this practice of killing each other to make the world a better place. The world is not improved by pillaging and burning. Scorching part of the earth will not save the whole earth.

So Good Friday was a contest over the central teaching of Jesus. Who understands best the real human nature/condition (or the will of God, to put it the other way)? Is it Jesus, who says that the way to deal with human imperfection or sin, is to forgive one time after another, to help each other try again, or those who killed Jesus, believing that some bad people have to be killed so that us good people can inhabit the world peacefully?

The vignette of Peter’s denial is a microcosm of this contest. There is a double sadness in this story: that Peter denied, and that the church has so universally misunderstood Peter’s denial. It was not a denial rooted in human weakness as generally understood, but rather in what is generally thought to be human strength and greatness. By both his actions and words Peter stands out as a brave man, ready to fight and die for Jesus. What he was not ready for was the disclosure of Jesus’ nonviolent response to the attacking enemies. Peter was overcome by unbelief and embarrassment when he saw Jesus refusing to take up the sword and defend himself, and he denied that he was identified with this man.

The story of Jesus is so irrepressible and universal because he taught this way of compassionate forgiveness, and placed it in tension with the prevailing practices of dominating power over nature and justified killing of humanity. Every person and every culture/nation lives in the tension between these ways of running the world. It is the existential choice of humanity, standing on the verge of ecological collapse and death by war.

But again, in the ironic words of W. Edwards Deming: “It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”

by Berry Friesen (March 28, 2017)

Imagine a man who combines the charm of an Irish storyteller, the hard realism of a 37-year veteran of the CIA and the compassionate heart of a Jesus-follower. That’s Ray McGovern.

He’s an itinerant witness for Church of the Saviour in Washington D.C., speaking about issues of war and peace on major media outlets, within the corridors of power and in nondescript church basements, wherever there is an audience open to political commentary cleansed of imperial propaganda.

A couple of local peace groups—1040 for Peace and Peace Action Network—brought Ray to Lancaster County PA this past Sunday for two public gatherings. He spoke at a church in the morning about the Israeli occupation of Palestine and at a pub in the afternoon about perpetual war.

This post doesn’t do justice to Ray’s presentations, but provides a few highlights.

Why is the USA always at war?

First, Ray quoted George Kennan, appointed in 1947 as the first Director of Policy Planning in the US State Department and widely regarded as the architect of post-WW2 US foreign policy.

“We have about 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3 per cent of its population . . . Our real task in the coming period is to maintain this position of disparity . . . To do so we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming . . . We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford the luxury of altruism . . .We should cease to talk about vague, unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we will have to deal in straight power concepts.”

Second, Ray reminded us of the Vietnam War, which caused the deaths of 3 million Vietnamese. He played a clip from Hearts and Minds, a documentary of the war, in which US General William Westmoreland is asked about the astonishing loss of life. Westmoreland’s response: “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.”

Ray simply added this: “It’s racism, folks!”

Next, Ray reminded us of how US leaders love to speak of the USA as “the world’s indispensable nation.” So other nations are then dispensable, right? That’s the message US leaders have been giving the world, both by their rhetoric and their policies.

Last, Ray reminded us that war is good for business. He quoted Pope Francis speaking to the US Congress in September, 2015:

“We have to ask ourselves: Why are deadly weapons being sold to those who plan to inflict untold suffering on individuals and society? Sadly, the answer, as we all know, is simply for money: money that is drenched in blood, often innocent blood. In the face of this shameful and culpable silence, it is our duty to confront the problem and to stop the arms trade.”

What about Russia?

While with the CIA, Ray was a Soviet specialist; he speaks Russian fluently. Over the course of his professional career, it was his job to follow closely Soviet events and monitor related diplomatic correspondence. Here is some of what Ray wanted us to know.

The decisive role in defeating Nazi Germany was played by the Soviet Union, not the Western allies. At least 25 million Russians died in World War 2; the death toll for the USA was 420,000.

To his credit, President George H.W. Bush reached out to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev as the Soviet Union began to fall apart. In February, 1990, Secretary of State James Baker and Gorbachev reached general agreement on two items: (a) Germany would be re-united and aligned with the West; and (b) the US would not expand the European military alliance (NATO) toward Russia’s borders. (You can read about that hereand here.)

The US has broken the spirit of that understanding repeatedly. In 1990 twelve European nations were part of NATO; today there are 28. It has been moving ever-eastward.

Moreover, the US engineered the election of the highly unpopular Boris Yeltsin to be president of Russia in 1996 (see here and here and here). During Yeltsin’s government, Russian and US oligarchs plundered Russia’s wealth.

The February, 2014 change in the Ukrainian government was an American-planned coup. Fascist elements played a major role in the coup and in the illegal regime that followed. We don’t hear reporting about this in the Western media. Instead, we hear about Russia’s annexation of the Crimea, where over 90 percent of the population voted in a public referendum to stay with Russia. Not a single life was lost in the change of government in the Crimea.

Sure, Russian intelligence hacks US computer networks; every nation hacks these days. But there is not a scintilla of evidence that the Russians provided WikiLeaks with the information it published about Hillary Clinton, the Democratic National Committee, or the Clinton fraud that resulted in the defeat of Bernie Sanders.

Regarding refugees:

The refugee crisis is fueled by recent wars in Iraq, Libya and Syria. The US has played a major role in all three.

Consider Syria: why did President Obama and candidate Clinton say “President Assad must go?” Syria never has threatened this country. But Israel doesn’t like Assad because he is independent of outside control and because he permits Iran to transport weapons across Syria to Hezbollah. And Israel drives US foreign policy in the Middle East.

Regarding the Israeli occupation of Palestine:

End the occupation! Is that so complex, so hard to understand? It’s gone on 50 years already, longer than the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe. It must end—now!

And let’s not forget: the ’67 war that led to the Israeli occupation of Palestine was started by Israel, not by any of its neighbors. Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was clear about this: “The Egyptian army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him.”

The Germans are right about our last presidential election here in the US: it gave us a choice between the plague and cholera, between Clinton-induced war with Russia and Trump-induced environmental disaster.

President Donald Trump is like a broken clock—right twice each day. To be specific:

–A good relationship with Russia is achievable and should be a US priority.

–Digital surveillance is everywhere now; no one is excluded. *

Ray said that the single biggest change in America since he began his career in 1963 is this: we no longer have a strong, independent press. That’s a huge loss; a strong, free press is what prevents tyranny.

No, we shouldn’t stop reading the New York Times and the Washington Post; it’s important to understand what we’re being told to believe. But be sure to read alternative media, such as ConsortiumNews.com.

What should peace-loving people be doing?

First, refuse to look away from those suffering from war.

Ray vividly reminded us of the death of Alan Kurdi, the 3-year-old Kurdish child who drowned in August, 2015 while attempting a boat crossing from Turkey to Greece. We all saw the image of his lifeless body washed up on a Turkish beach. As the line from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman famously said: “He’s a human being and a terrible thing is happening to him. Attention must be paid.”

Second, organize small action-and-accountability groups focused on ending perpetual war. “You’ll have better ideas together than you’ll ever have alone,” said Ray. “You’ll be stronger together than you’ll ever be alone. And together, you’ll be much better at following through on your commitments than you ever will be yourself.”

Thank you, Ray!———————* (4:30 PM addition: See this ConsortiumNews article from Ray McGovern and Bill Binney for the latest on government surveillance.)

The 2016 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have added to the anger, fear and misunderstanding already present in our communities. We refer specifically to the inflammatory and blaming language used by Donald Trump regarding Muslims, Mexican immigrants and women and by Hillary Clinton regarding the Russian government and “deplorable” Trump supporters. The election results require us to be far more serious about lost jobs and income. American households of all colors have suffered from economic policies and military interventions pursued by Democratic and Republican administrations over the past 25 years. Most importantly, we dare not ignore that the elevation of Donald Trump as President of the United States came with threatening, authoritarian messages. If such talk is not opposed, we open the way to more radical attacks on human rights and democratic processes here in the U.S. And we can expect even more reliance on military threats and force abroad. As followers of Jesus ourselves (see names below)—and with a fervent hope that other faith communities, secular groups, etc. might use this as a model—we feel led by God’s Spirit to call upon congregations and other assemblies to make the following public commitments in their communities:

We will protect and support the worth and rights of all people, including marginalized persons who are targeted, discriminated against or singled out by hate crimes or state-sponsored/sanctioned violence;

We will oppose the aspirations of those who seek U.S. global domination through the use of propaganda, inciting terror, military threats, regime change and war. We will support instead the practices of diplomacy and negotiation, which lead to peace.

We will support a just economic order—one that is sustainable as a servant of the people amid the changes in climate that have already begun.

To keep these promises, we will reach across lines of creed, class, ethnicity, race and party preference in a spirit of empathy and learning, seeking relationships of solidarity with other groups.

Originating Committee: John K. Stoner, founder of Every Church a Peace Church (jstoner42@windstream.net)Tony Brown, founder of Peacing It Together Foundation (tonyhb@hesston.edu)Rev. C. T. Vivian, civil rights leader and recipient of Presidential Medal of FreedomRev. Dr. Susan K. Smith, senior organizer for Fellowship of Reconciliation; consultant for Samuel DeWitt Proctor Conference(cassady2euca@icloud.com)Berry Friesen, co-author of IF NOT EMPIRE, WHAT? A SURVEY OF THE BIBLE

Initiators of this Call:(Affiliation is noted for identification only and does not convey organizational support for this Call)

“May you live in interesting times” is the ironic blessing conveying an expectation of conflict and disorder. It fits the period we have entered with the election of Donald Trump.

The billionaire candidate who captured the Republican Party’s nomination by the demagogic use of xenophobic, misogynist and racist rhetoric has won a decisive slice of the blue-collar middle class by taking seriously their declining economic prospects, their bewilderment over how the greatest military power in history keeps losing its elective wars and failing to achieve its explicit foreign policy goals, and their weariness of the hectoring social judgments of their more cultured and educated superiors.

He defeated a candidate far more experienced and better prepared to be President, a woman who combined a strong commitment to multi-culturalism, globalism and open borders with a track record of catering to Wall Street bankers, using military force to serve corporate interests and feather her own nest by selling access to government decision-makers.

Do you feel the dissonance of conflicting values, not only between the two candidates but within what each represents?

Meanwhile, as Trump strides onto the world stage, he encounters a United Kingdom negotiating its withdrawal from the European Union, a group of European nations under growing pressure from right-wing parties empowered by popular discontent over a the influx of Middle Eastern and North African refugees, Middle Eastern states notorious for their brutality in suppressing human rights and political dissent, and a Russia newly confident of its ability to chart its own course and thrive.

As you and I respond to all of this and more, what will guide us?

Psalm 146

At the election-day communion service I attended, Psalm 146 was our text.

“Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help. When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.

“Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the LORD their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them; who keeps faith forever, executes justice for the oppressed and gives food to the hungry.

“The LORD sets the prisoners free; the LORD opens the eyes of the blind; the LORD lifts up those who are bowed down; the LORD loves the righteous.

“The LORD watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of wicked he brings to ruin.”

The christianities of our time deploy gods for various contrasting purposes. We can tell which purposes are true to YHWH—the god Jesus of Nazareth worshipped—by remembering and honoring the biblical emphasis on justice for the oppressed and bread for the hungry.

Address Race with Care

Racism is a huge factor in American society, shaping all of us by its power and eliciting strong emotions on all sides. Yet race is not a biologic reality; it is a pernicious social construct created for purposes of exploitation and oppression.

To defeat racism—to dislodge it from our structures, to make it wither away—we must talk about the reality of racism. Yet if we speak about racism too much, or if we speak of it inaccurately, we add to its vitality and power and do more harm than good.

To hold together through this era we are entering, we must strive for a Goldilocks balance of enough honest talk about racism, but not too much.

This past Sunday the preacher in my congregation told stories from the book of Genesis and referenced a book by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence.

Repeatedly, the stories of Genesis subvert the cultural power of first born siblings (Cain, Ishmael, Esau, Leah, the older sons of Jacob) by blessing the later-born (Abel, Isaac, Jacob, Rachel, Joseph).

And repeatedly, those stories then go on to subvert the assumption that by blessing the later-born, YHWH has rejected the first-born. YHWH did not reject the first born; “YHWH rejects rejection,” said our preacher.

In this pivotal time, we are called to get involved and be partisans for our values. But if we wish to follow the way of YHWH, we dare not reject those we disfavor. Can we find it in our hearts to want a blessing for them too?

Pay Attention to the Signs

Staying alert will help us retain our balance and our ability to respond in flexible and measured ways. Here are a few important signs that popped up this past week.

1. Within hours of the election, President Obama directed US forces to stop supporting al-Qaeda in Syria and instead target its leaders. This policy reversal is fully attributable to the Trump victory.

As reported November 10 by the Washington Post, Obama “has ordered the Pentagon to find and kill the leaders of an al-Qaeda-linked group in Syria that the administration had largely ignored until now and that has been at the vanguard of the fight against the Syrian government.”

On the same day, the US Department of the Treasury reported its office of Foreign Assets Control has begun to disrupt the military, recruitment, and financing operations of al-Qaeda in Syria.

Together, these actions are expected to directly impact the ability of al-Qaeda to maintain its control of east Aleppo, thus clearing the way for the Syrian army to re-establish control without the intense aerial bombardment and street fighting that would have resulted in mass causalities.

2. Politico reports that lobbyists who work with Pentagon officials “are getting a flood of calls from longtime clients and new prospects eager to take advantage of a potential military buildup under President-elect Donald Trump.”

The article quotes an unnamed K Street insider: ““It is safe to say that defense lobbyists, as well as the defense industry, are pretty optimistic about a Trump presidency, at least coming out of the gates. That is both from an overall spending perspective but then also clearly he has a reputation and a record of deal making, which I think industry thinks is a good thing.”

Sounds like business as usual to me.

3. As we consider our neighbors and colleagues and wonder how they voted, reported data helps keep it all in perspective.

For example, around 54.6 percent of the electorate voted for either Trump or Clinton. This means that if we consider a typically diverse group of people (e.g., adults enjoying a city park on a Sunday afternoon), just over 27 percent voted for Trump and just over 27 percent voted for Clinton.

Or take another example, white evangelical Christians, who voted four-to-one for Trump. Because of low turn-out, Trump reportedly received fewer votes from white evangelicals than any presidential candidate since the data began to be collected in the 2004 election.

During his three-year tenure as Executive Chairman at Breitbart, Bannon is reported to have made it the premier media outlet for the racist, xenophobic and misogynist perspectives of the Alt-right movement. Though one is hard-pressed to find Bannon himself voicing bigotry, his deliberate actions to amplify bigoted viewpoints gives rise to the reasonable inference that he supports what bigots proclaim in the pages of Breitbart.

Media Matters describes the mission of the Alt-right as “rebranding of classic white nationalism for the 21st century.” It believes racial identity is a fundamental aspect of human nature and that America’s future success depends on emphasizing its European roots and defending its “white heritage” against influences from other parts of the world.

That Bannon—a promoter of such an ideology—will sit at the right hand of President Trump is cause for alarm.

5. The day after the election, organized protests occurred in numerous US cities. Generally, young adults distressed by the election of Trump populated these protests. This is to be expected and might be praise-worthy, depending on who is behind these protests and how they play out in coming days.

How did these citizen actions emerge so quickly in so many places and with such unified messaging? Sophisticated logistics are involved. Nikolay Nikolaev reports the vital role of one organization, including the money to offer protesters $190 a day:

“MoveOn.org is a progressive American non-governmental organization, established in 1998 in response to the impeachment against President Bill Clinton in the House of Representatives. Attracting significant funding, the NGO expanded its activities and maintains a number of smaller organizations in the network structure: the initiative, ‘Call for Change’, and the portal, ‘MoveOn’, petitions, in partnership with the similar Change.org, Avaaz and PetitionOnline. The main sponsors of the organization are the billionaire, George Soros, who officially donated $1.46 million, and the CEO of Progressive Corp., Peter Lewis, with half a million dollars” (emphasis in original).

George Soros is notorious in certain anti-imperial circles as “a Globalist investor in murder and mayhem” who lays the groundwork for regime change through so-called “color revolutions” in the streets. Ukraine is the leading example of this approach. Citizens-protesters form the core of a morally-infused presence in the streets challenging the legitimacy of those in power. While these highly sympathetic protesters grab the headlines, hidden elements planted by intelligence agencies inject violence and threats into the mix, thus eliciting a forceful counter-reaction from the government. This process plays out in an escalating pattern over weeks and months until it results in widening chaos and government paralysis.

Has this tactic now been deployed against the incoming Trump Administration? It’s not yet clear; we’ll need to pay close attention.

6. Whatever political identity we may claim, blogger Jim Kavanagh’s quote will keep us humble:

“Conservative Kansans fall for a plutocratic, imperialist agenda cloaked in patriotism, religion, and nostalgia for the good old Ed Sullivan days; liberal New Yorkers fall for the same plutocratic, imperialist agenda dressed up in multiculturalism, identity politics, and celebration of the good new Caitlin Jenner days. Who’s the bigger fool? How’s that working out for everybody? For the millions of victims of that top-down, plutocratic class war —in the ghettos of the cities and the hollows of Appalachia? For the Syrians, Iraqis, and Libyans, whose countries have been destroyed?”

George Lakey, a co-founder of Quaker Earth Action Group, makes the same point:

“We can build the scale of our movements by frankly admitting that alienated white working-class people are right: Both major parties are together destroying the country on behalf of the 1 percent. It may be hard for college educated activists to admit that the cynical working-class view is more accurate than the belief of graduates of political science courses. However, the sooner the humility arrives, the better. With humility comes the chance to scale up our campaigning and take the next step in the living revolution.”

August 9th, the 71th Anniversary of the Bombing of Nagasaki: Unwelcome Truths for Church and State

By Gary G. Kohls, MD

“What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (ie, destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in mere seconds.”

”…why should veterans embrace a religion that has blessed the wars that ruined their souls? It is no wonder that they turn to a gentle Buddhist monk to hear what are, in large part, the truths of Christ.” – Daniel Hallock

An irradiated crucifix lies in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral Following the Atomic Bombing of Nagasaki

In a nation whose citizens are historically non-Christian (Shitoism or Buddhism are the major religions), a disproportionately large number of the Nagasaki victims were Christian (see below for the history of that reality). The bomb mortally wounded uncountable thousands of other victims who succumbed to the blast trauma, the heat trauma and/or the radiation trauma.

In 1945, the US was regarded as the most Christian nation in the world. The bomber crew, as were the two Christian military chaplains of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki crews were products of the type of Christianity that failed to teach what Jesus taught concerning violence (that it was forbidden to his followers) – which has been the case for the vast majority of Christians, both clergy and laity, for the past 1700 years. Ironically, for the first 3 centuries of its existence, Christianity was a pacifist religion.

Even more ironically, prior to the bomb exploding directly over the Urakami Cathedral, Nagasaki was the most Christian city in Japan, and the massive cathedral had been the largest Christian church building in the Orient.

Those Christian airmen, following their wartime orders to the letter, did their job, and they accomplished the mission with military pride. Most Christian Americans would have done what they did if they had been in the shoes of the crew. And, if those Christians had never seen, heard or smelled the suffering humanity that the bomb caused on the ground, most of them would not have experienced any remorse for their participation in the atrocity – especially if they had been blindly treated as heroes in the aftermath.

Indeed, the use of the most monstrous weapon of indiscriminate mass destruction in the history of warfare, was later defined by the Nuremberg Tribunal as an international war crime and a crime against humanity.

Of course, there was no way that the crew members knew that at the time of the mission. Some of the crew did admit that they had had some doubts about what they had participated in afterwards. But none of them actually witnessed the horrific suffering of the tens of thousands of victims up close and personal. “Orders are orders” and must be obeyed, and disobedience in wartime was known to be severely punishable, even by summary execution. So the bomber crew had no alternative but to obey the orders. Even the two chaplains had no doubts before they finally understood what they had participated in.

<<<Making it Hard for Japan to Surrender>>>

It had been only 3 days since the August 6th bomb had incinerated Hiroshima. The Nagasaki bomb was dropped amidst massive chaos and confusion in Tokyo, where the fascist military command was meeting with the Emperor Hirohito to discuss how to surrender with honor. The military leadership of both nations had known for months that Japan had already lost the war.

The only obstacle to ending the war had been the Allied Powers insistence on unconditional surrender (which meant that Hirohito would have been removed from his figurehead position in Japan and perhaps even subjected to war crime trials). That demand was intolerable for the Japanese, who regarded the Emperor as a deity.

The USSR had declared war against Japan the day before (August 8), hoping to regain territories lost to Japan in the humiliating (for Russia) Russo-Japanese War 40 years earlier, and Stalin’s army was now advancing across Manchuria. Russia’s entry into the war had been encouraged by President Truman before he knew of the success of the atom bomb test in New Mexico on July 16.

But now, Truman and his strategists knew that the bomb could elicit Japan’s surrender without Stalin’s help. So, not wanting to divide any of the spoils of war with the USSR, and because the US wanted to send an early cold war message to Russia (that the US was the new planetary superpower), Truman ordered bomber command to proceed with using the atomic bombs against a handful of targets as weather permitted and as atomic bombs became available (although no more fissionable material was actually available to make another bomb after Nagasaki).

<<<The Decision to Target Nagasaki>>>

August 1, 1945 was the earliest deployment date for the Japanese atom bombing missions, and the Target Committee in Washington, D.C. had already developed a short list of relatively un-damaged Japanese cities that were to be excluded from the conventional USAAF (US Army Air Force) fire-bombing campaigns (that, during the first half of 1945, had used napalm, augmented by high explosives, to burn to the ground over 60 essentially defenseless Japanese cities).

The list of protected cities included Hiroshima, Niigata, Kokura, Kyoto and Nagasaki. Those five cities were to be off-limits to the terror bombings that the other cities were being subjected to. They were to be preserved as potential targets for the new “gimmick” weapon that had been researched and developed in labs and manufacturing plants all across America over the several years since the Manhattan Project had begun.

Ironically, prior to August 6 and 9, the residents of those five cities had considered themselves lucky for not having been bombed as had the other large cities. Little did the residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki know that they were only being temporarily spared for an even worse carnage from a revolutionary experimental weapon that could cause the mass annihilation of entire cities and their human guinea pig inhabitants.

<<<The Trinity Test>>>

The plutonium bomb that had been field tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico, was identical to the one that was dropped at Nagasaki. It had been blasphemously code-named “Trinity” (a distinctly Christian term) and had been detonated in secrecy 3 weeks earlier on July 16, 1945. The results were impressive, but the blast had just killed a few hapless coyotes, rabbits, snakes and some other desert varmints.

Trinity had produced large amounts of an entirely new type of rock that was later called “Trinitite”. Trinitite was a “man-made” radioactive molten lava rock that had been created from the intense heat that was twice the temperature of the sun. Samples of it still exist in the desert at Alamogordo.

At 3 am on the morning of August 9, 1945, a B-29 Superfortress bomber (that had been “christened” Bock’s Car) took off from Tinian Island in the South Pacific, with the prayers and blessings of the crew’s two chaplains.

Barely making it off the runway just yards before the heavily loaded plane could have gone into the ocean (the bomb weighed 10,000 pounds), it headed north for Kokura, the primary target. Bock’s Car’s bomb was code-named “Fat Man,” partly because of its shape and partly to honor the rotund Winston Churchill. “Little Boy”, first called “Thin Man” (after President Roosevelt), was the code name of the uranium bomb that had been dropped on Hiroshima three days earlier.

<<<Nagasaki was Being Incinerated as Japan’s War Council was Again Debating Surrender Terms>>>

Japan’s Supreme War Council in Tokyo, scheduled to convene their next meeting at 11 am on August 9, had absolutely no comprehension of what had really happened at Hiroshima. So the members had no heightened sense of urgency. The council was mostly concerned about Russia’s declaration of war.

But it was already too late, because by the time the War Council members were arising and heading to the meeting with the emperor, there was no chance to alter the course of history. Bock’s Car – flying under radio silence – was already approaching the southern islands of Japan, heading for Kokura, the primary target. The crew was hoping to beat an anticipated typhoon and the approaching clouds that would have delayed the mission.

The Bock’s Car crew had instructions to drop the bomb only on visual sighting. But Kokura was clouded over. After making three failed bomb runs over the clouded-over city and then experiencing engine trouble on one of the four engines (using up valuable fuel all the while) the plane headed for its secondary target, Nagasaki.

<<<The History of Nagasaki Christianity>>>

Nagasaki is famous in the history of Japanese Christianity. The city had the largest concentration of Christians in all of Japan. St. Mary’s Urakami Cathedral was the megachurch of its time, with 12,000 baptized members.

Nagasaki was the community where the legendary Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier planted a mission church in 1549. The Catholic community at Nagasaki grew and eventually prospered over the next several generations. However it eventually became clear to the Japanese that the (Catholic) Portuguese and Spanish commercial interests were exploiting Japan. It didn’t take very long before all Europeans – and their very foreign religion – were expelled from the country.

From 1600 until 1850, being a Christian in Japan was a capital crime (punishable by death). In the early 1600s, Japanese Christians who refused to recant of their new faith were subject to unspeakable tortures – including crucifixion. After a well-publicized mass crucifixion was orchestrated, the reign of terror stopped, and it appeared to all observers that Japanese Christianity was extinct.

However, 250 years later, after the gunboat diplomacy of US Commodore Matthew Perry forced open an offshore island for American trade purposes, it was discovered that there were thousands of baptized Christians in Nagasaki, living their faith in secret in a catacomb-like existence, completely unknown to the government.

With this revelation, the Japanese government started another purge; but because of international pressure, the persecutions stopped and Nagasaki Christianity came up from the underground. By 1917, with no financial help from the government, the re-vitalized Christian community had built their massive cathedral in the Urakami River district of Nagasaki.

<<<Christians Killing Christians in the Name of Christ>>>

So it was the height of irony that the massive Cathedral – one of only two Nagasaki landmarks that could be positively identified from 31,000 feet up – became Ground Zero. (The other identifiable aiming point landmark was the Mitsubishi armaments factory complex – which had run out of raw materials because of the successful Allied naval blockade.)

At 11:02 am, during Thursday morning confessions, an unknown number of Nagasaki Christians were boiled, evaporated, carbonized or otherwise disappeared in a scorching, radioactive fireball that exploded 500 meters above the cathedral. The “black rain” that soon came down from the mushroom cloud also contained the mingled cellular remains of many Nagasaki Christians as well as many more Shintoists and Buddhists. The theological implications of Nagasaki’s Black Rain surely should boggle the minds of theologians of all denominations.

<<<The Nagasaki Christian Body Count>>>

Most Nagasaki Christians did not survive the blast. 6,000 of them died instantly, including all who were at confession that morning. Of the 12,000 church members, 8,500 of them eventually died as a result of the bomb. Many of the others were seriously sickened with a highly lethal entirely new disease: radiation sickness.

Located near the cathedral were three orders of nuns and a Christian girl’s school. They all disappeared into black smoke or became chunks of charcoal. Tens of thousands of other innocent non-Christian non-combatants also died instantly, and many more were mortally or incurably wounded. Some of the original victims (and their progeny) are still suffering from the trans-generational malignancies and immune deficiencies caused by the deadly plutonium and other radioactive isotopes produced by the bomb.

And here is one of the most important ironies: What the Japanese Imperial government could not do in 250 years of persecution (ie, to destroy Japanese Christianity) American Christians did in mere seconds.

Even after a slow revival of Christianity after WWII, membership in Japanese Christian churches still represents a tiny fraction of 1% of the general population, and the average attendance at Christian worship services across the nation is reported to be only 30 per Sunday. The decimation of Nagasaki crippled what at one time was a vibrant church.

<<<George Zabelka, the Catholic Chaplain for the 509th Composite Group >>>

Father George Zabelka was the Catholic chaplain for the 509th Composite Group (the 1500 man USAAF group whose only mission was to deliver atomic bombs to Japanese civilian targets). Zabelka was one of the few World War II clergy leaders who eventually came to recognize the serious contradictions between what his modern church had taught him and what the early pacifist church believed concerning homicidal violence.

Several decades after Zabelka was discharged from the military chaplaincy, he finally concluded that both he and his church had made serious ethical and theological errors in religiously legitimating the organized mass slaughter that is modern war. He eventually came to understand that (as he articulated it) “the enemy of me and the enemy of my nation is not an enemy of God. Rather my enemy and my nation’s enemy are children of God who are loved by God and who therefore are to be loved (and not killed) by me as a follower of that loving God.”

Father Zabelka’s sudden conversion away from the standardized war-tolerant Christianity changed his Detroit, Michigan ministry around 180 degrees. His absolute commitment to the truth of gospel nonviolence – just like Martin Luther King’s commitment – inspired him to devote the remaining decades of his life to speaking out against violence in all its forms, including the violence of militarism, racism and economic exploitation. Zabelka travelled to Nagasaki on the 50th anniversary of the bombing, tearfully repenting and asking for forgiveness for the part he had played in the crime.

Likewise, the Lutheran chaplain for the 509th, Pastor William Downey (formerly of Hope Evangelical Lutheran Church in Minneapolis, MN), in his counseling of soldiers who had become troubled by their participation in making murder for the state, later denounced all killing, whether by a single bullet or by weapons of mass destruction.

<<<Why Should Combat Veterans Embrace a Religion that Blessed the Wars that Ruined Their Souls?>>>

In Daniel Hallock’s important book, Hell, Healing and Resistance, the author described a 1997 Buddhist retreat that was led by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. The retreat involved a number of combat-traumatized Vietnam War veterans who had left the Christianity of their birth. The veterans had responded positively to Nhat Hanh’s ministrations. Hallock wrote, “Clearly, Buddhism offers something that cannot be found in institutional Christianity. But then why should veterans embrace a religion that has blessed the wars that ruined their souls? It is no wonder that they turn to a gentle Buddhist monk to hear what are, in large part, the truths of Christ.”

Hallock’s comment should be a sobering wake-up call to Christian leaders who seem to regard as important both the recruitment of new members and the retention of old ones. The fact that the US is a highly militarized nation makes the truths of gospel nonviolence difficult to teach and preach, especially to military veterans (particularly the homeless, psychologically tormented, spiritually-depleted, malnourished, over-diagnosed, over-medicated, over-vaccinated, homicidal and suicidal ones) who may have lost their faith because of horrors experienced on the battlefield.

I am a retired physician who has dealt with hundreds of psychologically traumatized patients (including combat-traumatized war veterans), and I know that violence, in all its forms, can irretrievably damage the mind, body, brain, and spirit. But the fact that the combat-traumatized type is totally preventable – and oftentimes impossible to cure – makes prevention work really important.

An ounce of prevention is indeed worth a pound of cure when it comes to combat-induced PTSD. And where Christian churches should and could be instrumental in the prevention of the soul-destroying combat-type PTSD is by counseling their members to not participate in it (which should be obvious when considering the ethical message of the nonviolent Jesus, a message that guided the pacifist church in the first 3 centuries of its existence)

Experiencing violence, whether as victimizer or victim, can be deadly, and it can run through families like a contagion. I have seen violence, neglect, abuse and the resultant traumatic psychological and neurological illnesses spread through both military and non-military families – even involving the 3rd and 4th generations after the initial victimizations. And that has been the experience of the hibakusha (the long-suffering atomic bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki), whose progeny continue to suffer disease – which has likewise been the experience of many of the progeny of the warrior-perpetrators who participated in the act of killing in every war.

<<<What Should be the Church’s Role in the Organized Mass Slaughter That is War?>>>Years ago I saw an unpublished Veteran’s Administration study that showed that, whereas most Vietnam War-era soldiers were active members of Christian churches before they went off to war, if they came home with PTSD, the percentage returning to their faith community approached zero. Daniel Hallock’s sobering message above helps explain why that is so.

Therefore the church – at least by its silence on the critical issues of war and war preparation – seems to be actually promoting (rather than forbidding) homicidal violence, contrary to the ethical teachings of Jesus, by failing to teach what the primitive church understood was one of the core teachings of Jesus, who preached, in effect, that “violence is forbidden for those who wish to follow me”.

Therefore, by refraining from warning their adolescent members about the faith- and soul-destroying realities of war, the church is directly undermining the “retention” strategies in which all churches engage. The hidden history of Nagasaki thus has valuable lessons for American Christianity.

<<<The Bock’s Car Crew and the Chain of Command>>>

The members of the Bock’s Car bomber crew, as are conscripted or enlisted men in any war, were at the bottom of a long, complex, and very anonymous chain of command whose superiors demand unconditional obedience from those below them in the chain. The Bock’s Car crew had been ordered to “pull the trigger” of the lethal weapon that had been conceptualized, designed, funded, manufactured and armed by any number of other entities, none of which would feel morally responsible for doing the dirty deed because they didn’t have literal blood on their hands.

As is true in all wars, soldier trigger-pullers are often the ones unjustly singled out and blamed for the killing in the combat zone, and therefore they often have the worst post-war guilt and shame that is often the most lethal part of combat-induced PTSD (other than the suicide and violence-inducing aspects of many psychiatric drugs and the chronic illness-stimulating aspects of the over-vaccination schedules to which all military ecruits are subjected.

However, the religious chaplains that are responsible for their spiritual lives of their soldiers, are also at the bottom of the chain of command and may share their guilt feelings. Neither group usually knows the real reasons their commanders are ordering them to kill or participate in the killing operations.

Hopefully this essay will provoke needed discussions about the ethics of making murder for the state while simultaneously – and illogically – professing allegiance to the teachings of the nonviolent Jesus.

The early church leaders, who knew the teachings and actions of Jesus best, rejected the nationalist, racist and militarist agendas of whatever passed for nationalism 2000 years ago. And the Sermon on the Mount Christians of yesterday and today similarly reject the homicidal agendas of the national security state, the military-industrial-congressional complex, the war-profiteering corporations, the mesmerizing major media and the eye-for-an-eye retaliation church doctrines that have, over the past 1700 years, enabled baptized and confirmed Christians to, if ordered to do so, willingly kill other humans in the name of Christ.

If there is a god, may she have mercy upon our souls.

Dr Kohls is a retired physician from Duluth, MN, USA. He writes a weekly column for the Reader, Duluth’s alternative newsweekly magazine.

Harold Penner of $10.40 for Peace and Melissa Elliot from the Brandywine Peace Community hold a Cease and Desist order signed by many of the conference participants in front of the Horsham Air Guard Station during a public witness by attendees at the Faithful Witness in a Time of Endless War conference. Photo Credit: John Lien, Coalition for Peace Action.

About 100 participants gathered at Christopher Dock Mennonite High School, Lansdale, Pennsylvania, June 24-25, to focus on the theme: Faithful Witness in a Time of Endless War: Drone Warfare and God’s Call to Peacemaking. The conference grew out of a resolution of the same name passed by delegates at the 2015 Mennonite Church USA convention in Kansas City. The conference featured presentations by religious leaders, activists, academics, a former chaplain and a former CIA operative, culminating in a public witness at the nearby Horsham (Pennsylvania) Air Guard Station. The base is the site of an armed drone command center which recently became operational.

Several local Mennonite congregations supported the conference through planning and financial contributions. Lynelle Bush, conference attender from Salford Mennonite Church in Harleysville, Pennsylvania, said “Mennonites in our area need to have their eyes opened to the reality and true impact of drone warfare, to repent of silence and apathy, and to seek guidance of the Holy Spirit as to our role in speaking truth to power.”

Author and activist Medea Benjamin who has traveled to Pakistan, Afghanistan and Gaza to meet with family members of drone attack victims noted that drones kill many innocent people and turn terrorists into martyrs. She urged faith communities to speak to the issue of drone warfare or lose their moral voice.

Former CIA analyst Christopher Aaron began his presentation with a moment of silence to remember the people he had participated in killing. Aaron joined the CIA after the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center towers, believing that this was his opportunity to “do something that mattered.” He noted that despite “successes” in killing high profile terrorist targets, security in many Middle East towns and villages was actually worsening. He resigned from the drone program after realizing that he was part of a series of continuous conflicts with no discernable goal, similar to the situation described in George Orwell’s book, 1984.

Bob Smith, long-time peace activist in eastern Pennsylvania, spoke of the importance of infusing activism with love and outlined the history of a monthly public witness at the Horsham Air Base.

Former Mennonite Central Committee peace educator Titus Peachey offered a reflection on Luke 9, comparing the disciples’ impulse to call down fire from heaven on a Samaritan village with armed drone warfare. He noted that Jesus rejected this call from the disciples and changed the entire paradigm by telling the story of the Good Samaritan several days later.

In a spoken word performance, the artistry of Blew Kind linked drone warfare, white supremacy and colonization while accompanied by musical instrumentation mimicking the sound of the constant buzzing of a drone.

Former Army Chaplain Chris Antal talked about resigning his commission on April 12. While noting that he is not a pacifist, he believed his chaplaincy role had become that of priest and morale builder for the empire. He was deeply disturbed by the lack of transparency or accountability in the drone program, noting that it does not meet the criteria of “protecting the innocent.”

Kelly Denton Borhaug, Chair of the Religion Department at Moravian College, St. Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, began by saying that we live in a culture of death. She provided a probing analysis of the language of sacrifice present in war culture and Christian theology. Borhaug insisted that peace is not a commodity to be purchased with blood, but rather a way to live.

Several presenters discussed strategies for building a culture of peace. Muhammed Malik, co-founder of Muslims for Ferguson, discussed his practice of sitting with Christian communities to listen, build trust, and begin dialogue. Author and founder of The Simple Way, Shane Claiborne, described initiatives that create holy mischief, including street theater or highly symbolic acts such as beating guns into garden tools.

Preston Bush of the local conference planning committee said, “Just because Mennonite delegates affirmed the Faithful Witness resolution last summer doesn’t mean we have completed our prophetic responsibility in our own generation. What was the meaning of the resolution if it was not a mandate to ongoing action? The monthly witness at the Horsham Drone Command Center is our opportunity to really be who we say we are.”

The conference was initiated by $10.40 for Peace , Lancaster, Pennsylvania, as a way to act on the Mennonite Church USA resolution. Additional funding and planning support came from the Interfaith Network on Drone Warfare, and from the Brandywine Peace Community, which coordinates the monthly vigils at Horsham. – Submitted by Titus Peachey

Titus Peachey recently retired as the Director of Peace Education for Mennonite Central Committee U.S. He continues as a counselor on the GI Rights Hotline and serves on the Advisory Board for Legacies of War. He lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, with his wife, Linda Gehman Peachey. They attend East Chestnut St. Mennonite Church.

As we assess the meaning and morality of paying all of the taxes which support the American/USA system, we might well be asking whether the occasional presidential elections address the real issues in adequate depth.

This blog post, “Evangelical Stumble,” asserts that historically, the statements of great moral courage spoke to bigger issues than the views of individual leaders or would-be leaders. Read, and see what you think.

Does the word “empire” enter your conversations with friends, colleagues and family members? Is it used in your place of worship? Do you see it in the articles and books you read, the videos you watch?

When “empire” is part of your lexicon, here’s what also becomes part of your analytical framework.

An empire enforces its control of political, economic and social arrangements through its overwhelming capacity for violence—a capacity that can be deployed overtly or covertly, via highly sophisticated weapons or vicious death squads. Dissenters may occasionally make a stand, but they are certain to be defeated or co-opted and integrated as role players into the imperial apparatus. This superior capacity for violence is justified as “defense,” but within the context of empire is usually deployed to support expansion of control or to destroy a rival’s capacity to resist.

“Empire” prompts us to examine critically whether military, intelligence and surveillance capacities are being deployed defensively or for purposes of expansion and control.

An imperial economy is acquisitive, constantly seeking cheaply acquired “outside” resources to drive desired levels of growth and prosperity. Because an empire lacks the patience to strengthen and depend on the productivity of its traditional base, it neglects that base, which becomes less creative over time and more dependent on “outside” resources for prosperity.

“Empire” reminds us to pay attention to what fuels our economy and whether its prosperity is sustainable without taking advantage of “outside” resources.

An empire has no peer and thus is not accountable to anyone or anything, whether another nation, international law or its own constitution. An empire may periodically portray itself as accountable through elections, but this is largely pretense meant to re-legitimize its violent and coercive practices.

“Empire” encourages us to monitor the dynamics of accountability. Are the elite held accountable for their crimes and failures? Does the state live within limitations set by others? Do elections ever cause a change in direction?

Though violence is a vital tool of an empire, its primary method of maintaining dominance is through the constant communication of public narratives that describe international events and how the world works. These public narratives are imbued with religious and moral themes that legitimize the empire’s behavior in the world. Most of all, these story lines serve to define the “reasonable” range of options for running the world, thereby marginalizing other points of view. Within an empire, the thought of life without the empire is almost unimaginable.

“Empire” makes us aware of public narratives, what is said and what isn’t said, and how those choices serve the interests of the ruling elite.

There is a tradition that subverts the myth that empire reduces violence, spurs prosperity and lifts the human spirit. This tradition sees empire as a malevolent force, one that deliberately pits people against one another, traps us with false choices, and pillages Earth while portraying its own violence as a tragic but necessary part of human progress. This tradition is particularly evident in the Bible, where the empire is portrayed as the great deceiver, idolater and oppressor.

“Empire” puts us in touch with ancient sources of wisdom that describe empire as a great evil. These sources have endured through the centuries despite powerful efforts to suppress or obscure them.

Lastly, lest I be misunderstood, I acknowledge life includes many forces that are dominating: parents, spouses, schools, employers, military service, etc. Generally, however, each controls only a season of life and/or only a portion of our existence. But an empire leaves its subjects with few avenues of escape; one cannot find an alternative by waiting a few years or moving to another town or country. However long one waits, wherever one goes, the empire will be there defining how the world works.

Furthermore, I acknowledge there is room for debate on the question of whether or not the US-led configuration of power (Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand and its corporate elite near the center; NATO members, Israel and their corporate elite in the second ring; a third ring consisting of a host of subordinate states and their corporate elite; and sundry militias, crime syndicates and terrorist groups in an outer ring) functions as an empire. As discussed in chapter 6 of If Not Empire, What?, John K. Stoner and I think it does; many disagree.

Whatever your point of view regarding the current US-led configuration of power, you will find much value in adding “empire” to your analytical framework.

This article first appeared as a sermon at First Mennonite Church in Lincoln, NE, in April, 1999. It later was printed in The Mennonite although I’m not sure of when that was. It has been used as a sermon in Fresno at Mennonite Community Church, the Unitarian Church in Fresno ( where I got the only standing ovation for a sermon ever) and in several other places. So, the data on Mennonite giving is dated although I would doubt that it is much different today.

As most of you are aware, this Thursday is the date that our tax returns are due at the IRS offices across this country. April 15 creates a moral dilemma for most Mennonites, although most of us would never really acknowledge it. Paying taxes fosters a type of split personality in most Mennonites . . . a Jekyl and Hyde way of looking at this issue.

On the one hand, we staunchly believe that we cannot help our government by fighting in the armed forces, while at the same time we provide that same government with all the cold hard cash it needs to pay others to do it. This split personality allows us to pay for war without having to fight in it.

But it takes a great deal of mental gymnastics for us to make this leap . . . our consciences are used to it by now, though. We really don’t even think about it anymore. What’s to think about? The government requires us to pay taxes, but since we obtained conscientious objector status in the ‘40’s we no longer are required to join the army. Open and shut case, except for that split personality disorder.

Think about this for a minute. How is it possible for people who don’t believe in violence, to actually pay for war? That presents us with a moral dilemma. It isn’t possible to pray for peace and pay for war unless you suffer from delusions or a split personality. The two concepts are polar opposites. But ninety-nine percent of Mennonites do pay for war while they pray for peace.

John Steen, in a 1969 leaflet entitled “Death and Taxes”, challenged us with these words:

If you were handed a gun, right now, told to shoot a man – or drop napalm on a village – you couldn’t do it. . . . But the same good people who would vomit at the sight of burning flesh and blood on our hands have no qualms paying taxes for somebody else to kill and burn. If we are forced to face the issues, we make excuses. . . . The managers of the Empire will let us speak – as long as we hand over the young men and the cash. And we are afraid to refuse. . . .The government could never get away with murder – in Vietnam or anyplace [Iraq or Kosovo] without help. The War Machine must be fed warm bodies and cold cash by the millions.

Steen penned these lines nearly 30 years ago at the height of this nation’s involvement in the Vietnam War, but they are even more incriminating today. The United States spends nearly three times as much money for the military machine today than it did at that time.

That amounts to $8,271 per second, $725, 274,725 per day and more than $5,076, 923,976 per week on military power!

This annual drain on our resources not only keeps us from attacking the problems of poverty, the deficit and Social Security in our country, it also equips the rest of the world with weapons which kill millions of people every year. The weapons of the military kill. They kill when they are fired. And even when they are not used, these weapons kill by consuming valuable resources that are essential in meeting human needs.

These are not new thoughts for Mennonites. We have always believed that peace is the will of God and that we are to be peacemakers in this world. The latest Mennonite Confession of Faith, approved in 1995 by both the General Conference Mennonite Church (GC) and the Mennonite Church (MC) states: “We believe that peace is the will of God. . . as followers of Jesus, we participate in his ministry of peace and justice. He has called us to find our blessing in making peace and seeking justice. . . .”

Both MC’s and GC’s have also passed resolutions that support those Mennonites in their midst who refuse to pay for war. These same resolutions also urge all Mennonites to support the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund and to work towards passage of legislation that will allow people of conscience to pay taxes that go only for peaceful purposes. Our history would suggest that peace is something vitally important to our faith . . . something that we should pay more than lip service to.

The problem lies in our split personality . . . in the mental gymnastics we use to excuse ourselves from the reality of our actions, from the reality of paying for war. The reality is that we do pay for war while we pray for peace. We have separated our actions from our belief by rationalizing that we don’t really have any choice . . . the government requires us to pay taxes. That is true. But the government required that we serve in the army before the Alternative Service Act was passed in the ‘40’s. We refused to serve in the armed forces then. Once they accommodated us by granting us CO status we gladly gave them our money so that they could continue to kill in our names. And they do kill, through aggressive military maneuvers and by supporting almost every government in the world through the sale of arms.

We have separated our pocketbooks from our consciences. Money has become that topic which is nobody’s business but our own. As a result, we allow no one to hold us accountable to the way we spend it. That includes our tax money as well. That is a money issue and no one has the right to tell us how to handle it. Consequently, we take the path of least resistance and pay the military portion of our taxes even though that violates our consciences.

I have to admit that Mennonites are sick. We suffer from a split personality disorder when it comes to taxes that go for war. We have taken the road of least resistance. And our government is thankful for that. It was a small price to give us the option of alternative service. They really are more concerned that we continue to provide them with the cold, hard cash needed to pay for their wars and military build-ups, one of which we see in our living rooms each and every day now. They do it with our blessing because we have convinced ourselves that we have no other recourse. The reality is that we do have other options. . . but not options without risk.

If we are really serious about following after Jesus, we first need to be healed. . . healed of our sinfulness. We seem more concerned about other’s sins these days than our own . . . as exemplified by our concern to keep the church pure and sin-free while we happily continue to indulge our own sinfulness by paying others to kill. We spend inordinate amounts of time trying to keep homosexuals out of the church, women out of leadership and defending our own interpretation of scripture while we continue to pay for war with little thought or concern. In order to be healed we need to recognize that we have a problem. We need to ask for forgiveness. And we need to strive to sin no more. But these kinds of mental disorders are hard to cure. However, we believe that God can do just that. And God will help the minute we come to grips with our complicity in the military endeavors of our nation.

It is time for Mennonites to do some serious soul-searching on the issue of war taxes. John Stoner, of Every Church a Peace Church, has said: “We are tax resisters because we have discovered some doubt as to what belongs to Caesar and what belongs to God, and have decided to give the benefit of the doubt to God.” It is time for us to realize that we have given the benefit of the doubt, when it comes to paying for war, to the government. It is not acceptable or consistent to pray for peace and pay for war. If we believe that peace is the will of God, then how can we pay the portion of our taxes that are used to kill, even if the government requires it?

Right now, nearly half of our national budget goes for present military expenditures or for the interest on loans taken out in the 1980’s when the Reagan administration tripled the defense budget. We budget over $400 billion on defense every year, not even counting additional unbudgeted money to fund the war in Iraq. And recently we have heard cries from military leaders about how they need even more in the future. Even the countries that could be considered our five “enemies” together barely spend half of the amount annually that we spend on the military. The unconditional support of the military that our government asks of us is obscene. They withdraw support from welfare mothers and aid to dependent children while they increase corporate welfare to the military industry. As a people of peace we cannot continue to pay for such irresponsibility in good conscience. It is time for us to listen seriously to our consciences again . . . and to refuse to pay for such atrocities. We are a conscientious people that has lost its way and fallen ill. It’s time to address our personality disorder and listen once again to Jesus’ call to be peacemakers not war supporters.

We can refuse to pay for war in many ways. We can withhold the 3% federal tax on our telephone bills. We can withhold a percentage (from 1-50%) of our income taxes and give that amount to Mennonite Central Committee. We can keep our income below taxable levels. We can support the National Campaign for a Peace Tax Fund with our time and our dollars. Whatever we do, we can no longer rationalize our decision to pay for war. We know better. Our actions need to be consistent with our beliefs. God has not changed. Peace is the will of God. We are the ones who have strayed. We need to change. We need to pray for peace and we need to refuse to pay for war.

Jesus encouraged us to give to God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. God is the God of Peace. Those who call themselves Christian must also be people of peace. By paying for taxes that go for war we are not acting as people of peace, regardless of how we rationalize it.

John Stoner did an analysis that found that for every $9 Mennonites spend on their military taxes they give $5 to charitable causes. With one hand we destroy and with the other we build. In fact, we pay almost twice as much to destroy as we do to build up. Is that the kind of witness we want to give the world? The millions of people in this world that suffer because of the sway of the US military are waiting for us to do something about this imbalance. 32,000 children die each day because there isn’t enough money to pay for vaccines and food needed to help them live. Add to that the thousands of others who are killed by these military weapons and land mines . . . how can we possibly continue to support such irresponsibility?

We need to think seriously about what we are doing. Pray about it. Pray that God will give us the courage to stand up for our convictions. It is time for us to come to grips with our complicity in this carnage. May God guide our discernment.

To speak truths which, though they may be uncomfortable to hear and unwelcome to some, are not rendered false by their scarcity nor unspeakable by the painful realities which they disclose.

We are here to speak for those whose voices have been silenced by death or by economic and military oppression.

We are here to question those who believe that security can be attained by coercion and homicidal practices, and to assert that God has made a world in which humanity can solve it’s problems by the difficult works of conversation, compassion and generosity.

Under this roof we are a diverse group, but the diversity is less impressive than the oneness. We all belong to the same family–the human family.

A transfusion of your blood to me could save my life. A transfusion of my truth to you could save yours–and vice versa, for both blood and truth.

I am John Stoner from Akron, Pennsylvania. I have lived in this state since my birth in 1942, paying my taxes and speaking my truth since becoming an adult in 1960.

Many of you have come from the Mennonite World Conference Assembly at the Farm Show Complex to speak words of lamentation and warning about the conduct and consequences of drone warfare. Others have come to hear what will be said about military drones. To each and all of you, I say “Welcome”.

Hear these words from the writer of Ecclesiastes, chapter 4. Ecclesiastes 4:1-4

Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed—with no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power—with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.Then I saw that all toil and all skill in work come from one person’s envy of another. This also is vanity and a chasing after wind.

And from Jesus, these words:

Seek first the empire of God and its justice, and all these things will be yours as well.

Lamentation Regarding Weaponized Drones

It has been said drones are very precise . . . that compared to other weapons, they kill few people and cause little damage. It has been said they are inexpensive to deploy and pose little risk to our own personnel. It has been said that weaponized drones are a more moral way to conduct warfare, a less violent instrument of foreign policy.

But today, we say that terror cannot be defeated by terror. Today, we join our voices as Mennonites and Brethren in Christ from around the world to lament this false morality of weaponized drones, this chasing after the wind (Ecclesiastes 4:1-4).

1. We lament the innocent lives snuffed out by drones—the wedding guests, the men assembled to solve local disputes, the families gathered for food and fellowship.

It has been said few innocent civilians are killed, but this is a lie, a lie facilitated by assuming all men of military age are militants, even though there is no evidence they are militants.

The great majority of those killed are not on a kill list and the governments that kill them do not know their names. A study of drone strikes in Yemen found that in an effort to kill 41 identified individuals, 1,147 unidentified individuals were killed. That’s 28 unintended killings for each intended killing.

2. We lament the massive disruption to family life, work, education and daily activities caused by the constant presence of weaponized drones. Communities are traumatized by anxiety. Children stay in-doors, imagining it is safer there. Neighbors avoid attending to those injured by a drone attack, knowing that a second attack often follows the first. Families avoid the funerals of loved ones, afraid that a drone will attack the mourners.

3. We lament how weaponized drones have radicalized targeted communities, driving more men and women into violent resistance. An enemy of 1,000 may suffer 5,000 deaths from drones, but 10,000 will stand ready to take their places.

4. We lament how the deployment of weaponized drones erodes the rule of law. A nation may not violate the sovereignty of another nation by crossing its borders and killing its citizens, yet this is exactly what weaponized drones routinely do.

This is justified by the “imminent threat of terrorism,” but this is only playing with words. In today’s world, the word “terrorist” has been politicized and simply means “enemy,” nothing more and nothing less. The phrase “imminent threat” simply means “armed and angry,” which is the natural consequence of living under the constant threat of drone attacks.

Predictably, nearly all governments are rushing to acquire this new killing capacity. Nearly two dozen nations already have it, and within a few more years, most will have it.

5. We lament how weaponized drones are making violence and killing easy, thus subverting more peaceful and enduring forms of foreign policy. The difficult work of building a stable international order brick by brick, of moderating national goals in the pursuit of international peace, is swept aside by the quick-fix of targeted killing.

6. We lament the moral injuries to those conducting drone attacks. They work in an environment where innocent men, women and children are “bug splat,” body tissue rent asunder and strewn across the landscape. We lament that this terror-producing activity is coming to Pennsylvania via a kill command center at Horsham, and that young men and women are being trained as we speak at Fort Indiantown Gap to carry out these atrocities.

7. We lament the callousness of our own consciences, our reluctance to pay attention to the suffering caused by weaponized drones.

Against the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, we have valued the lives of our own countrymen more than the lives of those living in far-off places. We have regarded their lives as cheap and our lives as precious, their terrorism as evil and our terrorism as good.

Against the witness of history and the skepticism of our own traditions, we have swallowed hook-line-and-sinker the deceptions of governments and the distortions of the media. We have failed to remember that those who want war always manufacture our consent by twisting the facts into a righteous cause.

This is our lamentation. As God is our help, may we find courage and strength to resist these sorrows, this chasing after the wind.

The United States of America is experiencing an era of boundless and endless war. This era began Sept. 14, 2001, when Congress passed the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF). It is not expected to end within the foreseeable future.

This is a different kind of war, without traditional armies operating under rules of war. The entire world is the battlefield. The enemy is shifting and ill-defined; sometimes it is a group with a history of recent collaboration with the U.S. Often the enemy is described vaguely as “terror” or “insecurity.”

This continuous state of war is the new normal. One consequence is that our nation no longer experiences times of national debate related to the morality of its participation in war.

Drone warfare is emblematic of our current state.

 It is carried out in nations whose governments are not

at war with the U.S. It entails no declaration of war and little oversight by Congress. The President decides where, when and whom to kill. It is of doubtful legality under international law and, when directed against a U.S. citizen, of doubtful legality under U.S. law.

 It is a cheap way to conduct war and avoids loss of American life. This changes the calculus of war, making it painless for the vast majority of people living in the U.S.

 It often targets private residences and thus kills many innocent people. It terrorizes civilian populations by making normal routines of daily living acutely stressful.

 Many who experience drone attacks are radicalized by the experience. They perceive it as an acute injustice, which fosters a desire for revenge and heightens the risk of more terror.

We remain committed as a church to the belief that participation in war is contrary to the will of God. Yet as we live in the environment described above, we experience uncertainty about how to make our belief relevant to neighbors and friends and part of the “good news” we have found in Jesus Christ. When our young men were being drafted into the military, our belief translated into a specific witness within our context. Now, we need renewed understanding of how to live out the “new creation” that is in Christ Jesus (2 Cor. 5:17).

Again, drone warfare is a revealing example of our current uncertainty. Our congregations have paid little attention to its thousands of victims, many (some would say most) of whom are innocent of any ill intent toward the U.S. When we speak of drone warfare, we are apt to note its advantages as compared to “boots on the ground.” Although innocent individuals are being killed on our behalf, we rarely object. Although a new “generation” of robotic weapons is being developed to protect our “security,” few of us have dissented. This suggests that our moral sensitivities have become calloused and that we are adapting to the normality of continuous war.

Therefore, the Delegate Assembly of Mennonite Church USA:1. Calls affiliated congregations to a renewed emphasis

on trusting God and the way of Jesus, not violence, for our security. For this teaching to be effective, it must address our society’s commitment to the moral necessity of violence, our government’s undisclosed purposes in its so-called “security efforts,” and our often secret sympathies with so-called security operations. It also must seek the renewal of our minds in Jesus Christ (Romans 12:2).

2. Calls the agencies, educational institutions and conferences affiliated with Mennonite Church USA to ministries of healing and renewal in response to the moral injuries experienced by those who feel the guilt for having killed in the name of security and experienced by those who feel no guilt for the killing done on their behalf (John 8:11; Amos 5:21-24).

3. Directs the staff of Mennonite Church USA to actively seek and implement forms of public ecumenical witness to our confession: “Some trust in their war chariots and others in their horses, but we trust in the power of the Lord our God” (Psalm 20:7).

4. Calls for an immediate ban on research, develop- ment, production and deployment of robotic and autonomous weapons, including military drones, and associated Artificial Intelligence technologies— placing them in the same category as chemical and biological weapons.

Passed by the Mennonite Church USA Delegate Assembly at Kansas City, Missouri, July 1, 2015

(Dr. Kohls was an early supporter of Every Church a Peace Church which was a precursor to 1040 For Peace.)

“Down in New Mexico we were trav’lin’ along. Stopped in Los Alamos, didn’t stay long, But we wanted to see the scene of the crime Where they made the A-bomb and then created a shrine.”—From Keeping the Peace, by singer-songwriter Sara Thomsen

70 years ago this week (July 16, 1945), an assortment of foreign scientists, the original group of which were mostly refugees fleeing European fascism, succeeded in exploding the first experimental atomic bomb.

The site of detonation of the plutonium bomb (which was essentially identical to the one that ambushed and destroyed Nagasaki a few weeks later on August 9) was in the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico. The site of the blast was to become blasphemously known as the Trinity Site. Trinity was the code name for the experiment and the Manhattan Project was the code name for the US Army’s secret project to develop atomic bombs, with the stated intent to use them against military targets in Nazi Germany. That is, until Germany surrendered before any of the bombs were ready to launch.

Then mission creep entered the picture and a scramble for other targets ensued. As I have previously written in this column, despite the certainty that Japan was trying to find a way to surrender with honor, the US military started looking for Japanese targets.

Motivating factors for not just mothballing the massively expensive project included 1) the huge secret costs that would be difficult to explain to Congress if the bomb hadn’t been used, 2) the momentum that had been built up was impossible to stop, 3) the unquenchable desire to achieve retribution against Japan for its ambush at Pearl Harbor (killing only 2,500 soldiers), and 4) the need to demonstrate to the USSR that we had “the bomb” and to warn Stalin to stay away from the spoils of the already defeated Japan.(https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-bombing-of-nagasaki-august-9-1945-the-un-censored-version/5345274)

The ragtag team of mostly English-as-a-second-language immigrant scientists had been ably headed by two American citizens, the physicist Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer (the first director of the Los Alamos [New Mexico] National Laboratories, which was code-named Project Y) and by US Army Colonel (soon to be promoted to brigadier general) Leslie R. Groves. Each had been charged with organizing the hugely diverse number of scientific teams and, in the case of Groves, the organizations necessary to produce the materials that could complete such a complex and expensive mission.

The project, called the Manhattan Project because it began in New York City, started in 1939 and cost $2 billion 1940s dollars to complete ($26 billion in today’s dollars). 90 % of the money was spent in the manufacturing processes and only 10% in research and development. 130,000 people had been employed over the war years. The project was slated to end at the successful conclusion of the war, but as is typical for Pentagon and corporate mission creep any number of megacorporations like Dow Chemical, ICI, Raytheon, and assorted investment banks interested in exploiting the publicly-financed nuclear research kept Los Alamos in business. Indeed the nuclear weapons research, development and production were accelerated, rather than stopped, and the world became immeasurably more unstable.

<<<Illegal, or at Least Poorly-documented Aliens Were the Inspiration and the Brains Behind America’s Manhattan Project>>>

Many of the “alien” scientist leaders in the Manhattan Project were refugees from Europe and many of them would become Nobel Prize winners for their achievements in nuclear physics; but at the time of their service, they had come to America mostly to escape Hitler’s fascist regime. Significantly, following the war, the Pentagon, showing its right-wing leanings, not only purged the leftist Oppenheimer (because of his family’s anti-fascist/communist/socialist history) but it recruited scores of pro-fascist, ex-Nazi scientists in Project Paperclip. There was, in fact, a race between the US and the USSR to recruit Hitler’s scientists. It is uncertain which nation won the race; perhaps both sides lost.

Each of the two leaders had certain characteristics that enabled the success of the mission. “Oppie”, as Oppenheimer was affectionately known, easily acquired loyalty from his co-workers and subordinates not because he was an authoritarian type like the military man Groves, but because he was respected and loved and therefore obediently followed.

Groves also achieved obedience and productivity from his underlings through classical military discipline that was accomplished, not out of love, but out of fear of punishment if performance wasn’t up to Groves’ standards. A military colleague of Groves, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Nichols, considered Groves “the biggest sonafabitch I’ve ever met”. That “drill sergeant brutality” approach also works (but only temporarily) when K-9 dogs are tortured in training until they are sufficiently vicious (but afraid of their masters) to attack any victim that is fingered. (But trainers are advised to watch their necks if they ever let down their guard.)

Of course, as occurs in all chain-of-command organizations (like most corporations, monarchies, fascist organizations, police states and in many punitive child-rearing families), Groves was motivated to succeed because of his own fears of punishment or disrespect from his superior officers. Like most of us, Groves was also motivated to succeed out of fear of demotion or failing to advance in his career or pay grade.

At the time of his appointment to manage the Manhattan Project, the grossly obese Groves (estimated to weigh up to 300 pounds, he was a chocolate candy and sugar addict) had been in charge of constructing the world’s largest office building, the Pentagon. The appointment to the Manhattan Project was initially regarded by Groves to be a demotion but being promoted to brigadier general helped to make the change more palatable.

<<<The Day After Trinity>>>

At the conclusion of the documentary film (nominated in 1980 for the Academy Award for best documentary film) The Day After Trinity, Oppenheimer was filmed answering a question about Senator Robert Kennedy’s efforts to initiate talks to stop the spread of nuclear weapons. Oppenheimer replied “It’s 20 years too late. It should have been done the day after Trinity.”

Here are excerpts from some Amazon.com reviews of The Day After Trinity. They express much of what I wanted to say in this essay.

“The Day After Trinity is a haunting journey through the dawn of the nuclear age, an incisive history of humanity’s most dubious achievement and the man behind it–J. Robert Oppenheimer, the principal architect of the atomic bomb. Featuring archival footage and commentary from scientists and soldiers directly involved with the Manhattan Project, this gripping film is a fascinating look at the scope and power of the Nuclear Age. (Amazon.com Editorial review)

“’I have become death’,” declared nuclear scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer upon first witnessing the terrible power of the atomic bomb. The Oscar-nominated documentary The Day After Trinity uses newsreel footage and recently declassified government film to trace the growth of the Manhattan Project under Oppenheimer’s guidance. The New Mexico A-bomb tests are shown, as are the aftermaths of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings.

“The final scenes detail Oppenheimer’s transformation from the ‘father of the A-bom’ to one of the most tireless opponents of nuclear power. The Day After Trinity received its widest distribution when it was telecast over PBS on April 29, 1981.

“The Day After Trinity covers both the day after, but more importantly the days before Trinity as experienced by the scientists who built the atom bomb. The story of the bomb is usually told from its public debut (at the Trinity test site), though the story begins long before. Here it is told very well, through fascinating interviews with the men and women who lived in the strangely utopian Los Alamos.

“Day After Trinity connects the humanity of the project with the horror of the result. The destruction at Hiroshima and Nagasaki make it hard to imagine the sort of people capable of creating such mass destruction. Perhaps for that reason, the creators are sometimes written off as mad scientists, or lumped in under Oppenheimer’s personality. But the people on the screen are brilliant, insightful, agonized, and funny. It contributes a great deal toward our understanding of the bomb, without making it any easier.” (https://docuwiki.net/index.php?title=The_Day_after_Trinity)

<<<Keeping the Peace or Sowing the Wind?>>>

In one of her early songs, “Keeping the Peace”, Duluth’s singer-songwriter Sara Thomsen wrote:

“Down in New Mexico we were trav’lin’ along. Stopped in Los Alamos, didn’t stay long, But we wanted to see the scene of the crime Where they made the A-bomb and then created a shrine.

“Not too far from my own back door Is a trigger that would signal up a nuclear war It travels down to the ground, across the sea And up from the water comes a nuclear submarine.

“Walkin’ through the woods with an old Swede saw Are some people who decided to uphold the law. They said, “Keepin’ the peace is a whole lot bigger And they cut down the pole of that nuclear trigger.”

Motivated by the same outrage (as expressed in Thomsen’s song) over what America’s warmongers have been doing to the planet and its creatures, every July 16 since 1990 a group of Catholic Christians have been gathering at the Trinity Site for a vigil. Similar to the School of the America’s watch efforts, the gatherings at Trinity have been important parts of the many nonviolent antiwar resistance efforts that attempt to raise the public’s consciousness about the diabolical evil that was unleashed at the Trinity Site on July 16, 1945.

<<<The Seeds of Fukashima’s Whirlwind Were Sown at Trinity >>>

Jesus joined many other moral philosophers in saying “as you reap so shall you sow”. Gandhi said that your means are your ends in embryo. What those sayings mean is that if one wants to achieve, for example, truth (an end), one cannot choose lying as the means to attain it. If one uses violence as a means to an end, one will not achieve peace. If one wants peace, one must choose peaceful means. In other words, one can predict failure or success of a desired end result according to the means that were chosen.

So nations that choose violence and war as a tactic in dealing with other nations and then claim that peace is the desired end, you will know that they are either deceiving themselves and others or are ethically severely compromised. And that is why the development and threat to use nuclear (or other) weapons, will not result in world peace, but rather endless war and retaliation.

Refusing to think about the long term consequences of our nation’s militaristic dominative power strategies (as usual) in the nuclear weapons proliferation that poisoned and bankrupted the two superpowers after WWII, the US military and certain of its civilian and corporate partners in crime have kept sowing the proverbial wind, and now the rest of us are reaping the whirlwind.

<<<The Lethal Consequences of Radiation Exposure>>>

The inevitable lethal consequences of widespread radiation from nuclear weapons testing and use (ex: depleted uranium armor piercing shells) and the huge unaddressed, impossible problem of widespread radioactive waste from nuclear power installations keeps coming back to haunt us, again and again, in the form of uncountable tens of millions of radiation-induced cancers, congenital deformities, physical and mental disabilities, neurodevelopmental disorders (of exposed soldiers, as in Gulf War Syndrome) toxic food, toxic habitats (Ex: Chernobyl and Fukashima), unaffordable nuclear arms races, permanent cold and hot wars (many of which were provoked by the Reagan-era escalation of America’s nuclear weapons industries in the 1980s), which provoked similar escalations by our fearful enemies. Our so-called American ingenuity and blind trust in the moving hand of the holy market can be so pitifully short-sighted (usually only looking out as far as the next quarter’s earnings reports), that corrupt crony capitalism can be rightfully blamed for having produced numerous international war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes against the peace.

In his antiwar poem “Armageddon” poet William Dickey identifies one of the major root causes of war and why our military leaders always seem to do what is best for the longevity of their military professions. Provoking endless war is good for the business of the Pentagon and all the industries that profit from war.

“Leonard Woolf said that there would be war

because the generals, having devised their weapons,

and seen them manufactured …

would have to try them out, and it is true.

There is no invention of man that has not been used

if it was capable of being used, and these are.

Electric cattle prods defame the soft personal testicles.

But from this Armageddon, the storm’s center,

not even a cry…

“There are thieves among us.”

As vilified as Harry Truman has been over the decision to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and then claiming to have lost no sleep over those decisions, he has been quoted as saying“All through history it has been the nations that have given the most to the generals and the least to the people that have been the first to fall.”

Truman was a neophyte on the world stage when FDR died so suddenly right before VE Day, and he was immediately surrounded by overwhelmingly militaristic types who were all in favor of using the new bomb. Nobody, even the physicists, fully understood the tremendous lethality of nuclear bombs nor could they have predicted the condemnation that would be leveled at America for being the first and only nation to use that weapon.

One civilian opponent of using nuclear weapons against civilian targets (an international war crime) was Oswald Brewster, a Manhattan Project contractor from New York. He wrote a heartfelt 3000 word letter to President Truman that said.

“This thing must not be permitted on earth. We must not become the most hated and feared people on earth, however good our intent may be. I beg of you, sir, not to pass this (letter) off because I happen to be an unknown, without influence or name in the public eye. There surely are men in this country to whom you could turn, asking them to study this problem.”

Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson and his military advisor (and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) George Marshall were so impressed with the sentiment and logic of Brewster’s letter, that they actually delivered it to Truman. But nothing could slow down the momentum towards the satanic, and the letter probably wound up in the circular file.

The Bible is the most diverse and time-tested set of writings we have on the intersection of life, empire and faith. It deserves careful attention in a time like ours when imperial “solutions” threaten Earth.

We are asking people to read the Bible the way it was written—as a collection of arguments about life, love and power. Especially, we ask people to pay attention to the big argument, whether God created the world to work by the imperial paradigm of domination and homicidal power or by the peasant-and-commoner vision of compassion and community.

If you are in Pennsylvania, read this note and use the template to ask our Governor to hold hearings on the Horsham Drone site.

GOVERNOR TOM WOLF, TAKE RESPONSIBILITY!
INITIATE PUBLIC HEARINGS!

Eliminate the Drone War Command Center in Horsham and All Drone War Activities in Pennsylvania!

Representatives of the Pennsylvania Interfaith Network Against Drone Warfare met with two members of Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf’s policy and planning staff at the Capitol in Harrisburg on April 13 to press for public hearings about emerging drone warfare activities in Pennsylvania including the imminent operation of a drone warfare command center at Horsham, Pennsylvania—matters of imminent and critical importance not only to the citizens of Pennsylvania but also to all of God’s creation.

To support this initiative, please e-mail your version of the following message as soon as you can to Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf at Governor@pa.gov with copies to members of his policy and planning staff who met with the Network on April 13—Mark W. Smith at markwsmith@pa.gov and Michael Chang at michang@pa.gov:

Dear Governor Wolf–

As Pennsylvania’s new Governor, you’ve already accomplished a lot including your earlier announced moratorium on the death penalty. Your actions suggest that you and your staff have what is necessary to address another issue of impending and critical importance to the citizens of the Commonwealth—emerging drone warfare activities in Pennsylvania.

Since March, 2013, the U.S. Air Force has been developing a drone warfare command center at the Air Guard Station in Horsham, Pennsylvania. I understand that it is scheduled to become fully operational sometime during this calendar year. (https://www.brandywinepeace.com/…/demonstration-at-horsham-…/)

From Horsham, drone operators will conduct remote-controlled drone attack missions, launching Hellfire missiles against people thousands of miles away. Drone operators are currently being trained for the command center in Horsham. I am also concerned about the Fort Indiantown Gap headquarters of the Pennsylvania Guard/Air National Guard where drone training operations are being conducted and surveillance drones are being deployed.
https://www.pennlive.com/…/drone_crash_fort_indiantown_ga.ht…

To date there have been no public hearings for Pennsylvania citizens and state authorities to address these emerging drone warfare activities at either of these locations or related drone warfare developments in the Commonwealth. In the interest of democracy and morality, I am asking you to initiate these hearings. I am addressing this concern to you because I believe that you have responsibility as Governor of Pennsylvania for the pressing reality of emerging drone warfare activities in Pennsylvania operating within a state agency under your direction—the Pennsylvania Air National Guard.

As one opposing drone warfare, I continue to encourage you to initiate public hearings regarding this ominous development in Pennsylvania.

Conscience Behind Bars: The Prison Letters of Norman Lowry is available now as paperback ($5.00) or FREE PDF BOOK.
Arrested for his acts of faith-inspired civil disobedience, Norman
Lowry reflects from his prison cell on what it means to follow Jesus in a
culture of perpetual war-making.